NSA GenCyber

In-Person Summer Camp for Teachers

Carnegie Mellon University hosted a NSA GenCyber experience for high school teachers in June 2024. Stipends are provided for teachers attending all 5 days of camp. The picoCTF for GenCyber Teacher Program (2024) by Carnegie Mellon University is designed for U.S. high-school computer science teachers who are interested to learn how to use online cybersecurity Capture-The-Flag (CTF) problems and competitions to introduce cybersecurity knowledge and skills to their students and to increase student interest in cybersecurity careers.

picoCTF for GenCyber Teacher Program (2024)
Camp Date: June 24, 2024 (Mon) to June 28, 2024 (Fri)
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

The primary objectives of our program are to:

  1. provide free education opportunities on cybersecurity knowledge and skills that are typically taught at Bachelor’s/Master’s level, e.g., cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and their defenses, thus making our participants more likely to feel comfortable using our content in their classrooms;
  2. show how all six GenCyber Cybersecurity Concepts and cyber ethics manifest in the design of secure computer systems, the practice of real-world cybersecurity professionals, and the cyber-computing experience in our everyday lives;
  3. collaborate with our K–12 Pedagogical expert and teachers to identify a set of curriculum integration points where the knowledge referenced above can be synergistically inserted into the existing high-school computer science curriculums; and
  4. customize a set of demonstration lesson plans on how to use CTF problems and competitions to excite students to learn cybersecurity knowledge and skills and to increase their interest in cybersecurity careers.


Online Lectures

Lectures are recorded and posted on the picoCTF YouTube channel.

Lectures on introductory level cybersecurity principles leveraging picoCTF content will be released monthly. Join us on Twitter for a Q&A session on lecture topics.

Lecture 1: General Skills in CTF’s Part 1

Learn cybersecurity CTF’s concept-by-concept. In this video, we consider number bases, encodings and the Shell.

Lecture 2: General Skills in CTF’s Part 2

Dive deeper into the shell with common commands, power tools and daisy chaining with pipes.

Lecture 3: Python in CTF’s

Learn Python through lecture, example and challenges in the picoGym.

Lecture 4: Forensics in CTF’s Part 1

Learn the abstract layers of a computer and how files can be viewed as hexadecimal.

Lecture 5: Forensics in CTF’s Part 2

Learn about disk analysis, the Sleuthkit and Autopsy from this challenge author.

Lecture 6: Forensics in CTF’s Part 3

Learn about pixels and digital steganography in this pico lecture.

Lecture 7: Forensics in CTF’s Part 4

Learn how to start off with packet analysis and Wireshark.



Contact

For more information, please email Megan Kearns at mkearns1@cmu.edu.