Teaching advanced network security concepts to high school students in a laboratory-based summer camp environment

  • Authors:

  • Wesley Spencer

  • Affiliations:

  • Murray State University, Murray, KY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th annual conference on Information security curriculum development
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The Cyber Cave is a student learning program and recruitment tool jointly administrated by Murray State University's Program of Distinction in Telecommunications Systems Management and the Murray State University Center for Telecommunications Management. The Cyber Cave summer camp is a free week-long camp in which high school students attend to learn about and build a complex voice and data network. Students are exposed to several advanced technologies such as network security and are assigned many tasks such as building an advanced bridging firewall using the Linux operating system. Teaching such complex concepts can be very difficult to students with little to no prior experience with network security. This paper describes the approach used by the Murray State University Cyber Cave to expose high school students to advanced network security concepts. It details both the pedagogical and technical issues of how to approach such a complex and challenging task and analyzes the results of the experience as a recruitment tool for the Telecommunications Systems Management program at Murray State University.