| NSF Org: |
DGE Division Of Graduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| 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 2015 = $167,044.00 FY 2016 = $166,101.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
300 TURNER ST NW BLACKSBURG VA US 24060-3359 (540)231-5281 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
300 Turner Street NW Arlington VA US 24061-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | CYBERCORPS: SCHLAR FOR SER |
| Primary Program Source: |
04001617DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001516DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| 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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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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