Award Abstract # 1744722
Building Educational Capacity in Cyber Operations

NSF Org: DGE
Division Of Graduate Education
Recipient: VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE & STATE UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: September 21, 2017
Latest Amendment Date: April 23, 2020
Award Number: 1744722
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Victor Piotrowski
vpiotrow@nsf.gov
 (703)292-5141
DGE
 Division Of Graduate Education
EDU
 Directorate for STEM Education
Start Date: April 1, 2017
End Date: June 30, 2021 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $57,063.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $390,208.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2013 = $57,063.00
FY 2015 = $167,044.00

FY 2016 = $166,101.00
History of Investigator:
  • Eli Tilevich (Principal Investigator)
    tilevich@cs.vt.edu
  • Kara Nance (Former Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
300 TURNER ST NW
BLACKSBURG
VA  US  24060-3359
(540)231-5281
Sponsor Congressional District: 09
Primary Place of Performance: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
300 Turner Street NW
Arlington
VA  US  24061-0001
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
09
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): QDE5UHE5XD16
Parent UEI: M515A1DKXAN8
NSF Program(s): CYBERCORPS: SCHLAR FOR SER
Primary Program Source: 04001314DB NSF Education & Human Resource
04001617DB NSF Education & Human Resource

04001516DB NSF Education & Human Resource
Program Reference Code(s): 9178, 7254, SMET, 9150, 9179
Program Element Code(s): 166800
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.076

ABSTRACT

This proposal seeks to improve the educational experience of cyber operations students around the nation by creating and deploying culturally diverse educational content in a proven remotely accessible environment, allowing students and faculty to obtain vital hands-on experience. While several academic institutions are developing programs dedicated to cyber operations, and many more are attempting to incorporate materials designed to give students a strong fundamental understanding of the challenges in this arena, experiential learning opportunities are currently limited by individual institutional funding; the need to provide isolated lab infrastructure in which these topics can be safely studied; and the challenges associated with developing realistic multicultural scenarios. This CyberCorps: SFS capacity-building proposal seeks to build on the successful NSF-funded Remotely Accessible Virtualized Environment (RAVE) Project and a decade of experience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in developing and delivering computer security lab environments and exercises. It develops cyber operations exercises and makes them available to faculty and students at institutions around the nation at no charge. This project incorporates culturally-appropriate virtual machines to extend the realism of the resulting scenarios which have a consistent format following the NSF-funded Security Injections @ Towson presentation model. The project uses an external evaluator specializing in the use of remotely accessible environments.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Long, Xingyu; Techapalokul, Peeratham; Tilevich, Eli "The Common Coders Scratch Programming Idioms and Their Impact on Project Remixing" Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN SPLASH Educational Symposium 2021 (SPLASH-E 2021) , 2021
Ma, Yuzhi; Tilevich, Eli "You Have Said Too Much: Java-Like VerbosityAnti-patterns in Python Codebases" Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN SPLASH Educational Symposium 2021 (SPLASH-E 2021) , 2021

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

This project took a non-traditional approach to improving cybersecurity: facilitate the process of educating the next generation of software developers who care deeply about security and treat it as a primary consideration in all software development phases. In introductory computing education, security is often treated as an afterthought: first make your program work correctly and only then possibly secure the correctly working program. In contrast, this project’s approach to teaching cybersecurity in computing education focused on promoting disciplined software development practices, with a particular application to the quality of student-written source code. As a traditional quality attribute of software systems, code quality can serve as a natural pathway for educating students about security. The project built on the success of Scratch, a highly successful programming language and platform for introducing novice programmers to computing. Among the specific outcomes of this project is a catalog of common Scratch programming idioms. These idioms are reflective of the canonical programming style in Scratch, thus potentially benefiting both introductory computing educators and learners. This project also studied how computing students’ first programming language affects their code writing practices in their subsequent languages, with respect to idiomatic adherence and conciseness. In particular, we identified the presence of Java-like non-idiomatic verbose coding patterns in Python codebases and suggested how computing educators should focus on teaching students how to write concise idiomatic code in any language.


Last Modified: 09/27/2021
Modified by: Eli Tilevich

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