A cyber security discovery program: Hands-on cryptography

As our society increasingly depends on information systems, it is critical for government and private organizations to have access to a talented pool of individuals who are skilled in confronting threats to information security, responding to emergencies, protecting vital information technology assets, and helping to create policies that ensure the privacy of individuals. However, the educational pipeline of the information security workforce is not promising. Particularly, minorities and women constitute a very small percent of the information security workforce. In this paper, we present Cyber Security Discovery Day, a day-long cryptography workshop for middle school students. The overall objective of the workshop program is to introduce students to information security career pathways through informal learning experiences. The workshop program includes many educational as well as fun hands-on activities.