I spent Thursday and Friday of this past week in Manassas training for an upcoming summer Cyber Security Camp for TC Williams students. The training's purpose was to teach the teachers how to teach the students.
In the Summer Camp, the students will spend a lot of time working with Boe-Bots. The "Boe" in Boe-bots is for board of education. The bots were designed as scalable teaching robots. The students get to both build these robots and program them in multiple configurations.
So, we teachers got to spend the better part of two days building, programing, and playing with them. It was loads of fun. I had never built a robot before. The programing was in pbasic. So, this won't be training in a language that will have legs for the students, but it's a nice intro.
Our profession development was provided by Nicerc. Their entire operational model entails promoting Cyber literacy and security to the K-12 world. So, their material is focused and on point. The three trainers we had were excellent. They were patient in their teaching of us. (Teaching teachers can be a thankless and irritating task.)
The Titan staff is a collect of STEM and liberal arts teachers. They're a energetic, engaged, and skilled crew. I look forward to partnering with them.
As the tech assigned to this camp, I won't have any direct teaching responsibilities. Having said that, there will be many possible ethics related teachable moments. So, I don't plan on being the IT guy hiding in the shadows. Also, there is one section under liberal arts that is centered on Cyber Ethics. I'm going to see is I can get myself assigned as a co-teacher.
I'll let you know how it goes this summer!
