Teaching Kids Programming and Cyber Security

Focus ready to start all right so hi Welcome to our talk on teaching kids programming inside of security I'm D and Terry and I'm S I work with daily on this project so here a little bit about us uh we're Sheffield har University student there we study computer security with forensics we're also part of the stem ambassadors program which is run by stemnet so some mentioned stemnet uh it's a organization runs the stem ambassador program uh obviously stem stands for science technology engineering math and we going in local schools do activities we do year n option evenings lots of advice and part of these things is ecpc which Sam's going to mention to you now so last year

late September we opened a business called ecpc which is sh for early computer programming club uh our main objective was to go into schools and teach primary kids programming using schools using tools like scratch code.org Etc and he was run as an after school activity rather than just lessons so as Sam mentioned we started this in September last year as a university project uh myself and Sam and three other students um I manage it we've been getting a lot of interest but sort of growing into just this big project we've got loads of schools in South Yorkshire involved um we've been getting a lot of interest but also we did an interview for BBC Radio Sheffield um a couple of

months ago which was huge in getting us involved so so we were also part of the National Science and engineer engineering week where we went into schools and we did a 1H hour talk with primary kids and we basically tried to get them engaged into programming we talked about the basics of programming and did some fun exercises Games Etc so we use tools like SC patch we hooked up the Xbox 360 connect with it we didn't bring that here today we just wanted to show you one of the things we did with the Arduino baseboard we also mentioned um oops ad a love La who was one of the world's first programmers in the 1800s technically and how women were

quite prominent actually in programming so we're trying to get girls interested in this as well we think that's really important uh s mentioned to you about science week a little bit briefly but we did uh we did these with activities such as the one we're about to show you and we've got some images from that as well So This Is Us in the science week where we actually went into schools and these R 100 kids and we went through exercises with them and they their own little mac where we you know they can follow tutorials and they we're making games using IF statements Loops Etc and this is just one of the several talks we did

have a video but we couldn't get permission from the parents for the kids so we're going to show that but there massive issues I'm going to show you the demo now uh I'm really scar so this is one of the tools we use to get kids engaged so just a little bit of background before I start it uh it's a it's called a Makey Makey it's a based on an Arduino Leonardo bootloader and all it does is PL plug in crocodile Clips to certain keys on the keyboard and on here what we do is we show them on this on the screen what a certain sort of like vend driven programming and we show them so what does what does each

key do it plays a note so if I go to C which is the up key that plays a noise on the laptop if you press the up key and we talk about all the logical so how it changes The Logical concept of programming it changes the costume on the left and but before we do that with them we actually this should work hopefully so you Earth yourself I knew it wouldn't work when I did there we go and usually works quite well it worked well this morning didn't it work very well this morning that one's not connected [Music] sorry and that's what we do with kids uh it gets them really interested in it and

there's so many things you could do with it uh we had I sell Pac-Man with some blue Tack and you can do an up down left right and when they press it and they bir themselves they can play Pac-Man so it's really interesting so they play for a while then we teach them the Code behind it that's the idea okay all right so why are we doing this um I don't want to bore you with loads of from the this from the national curriculum in England framework this is coming into place in September 2014 and it's replacing the ICT subject for to called Computing and the be learning programming that's the theory behind it so this is the key C2 framework and

basically kids will be learning coding by using pseudo code kids will be learning about you know the basics of programs how to make programs how they simply work they'll also be learning about simple networds and the worldwide web and how do use browsers to go get data Etc again breaking the rule of loads of text on the screen but this is key stage three the key points we took away from it were uh secondary schools is key stage three so they' been doing Boolean logic and do and not so that's sort of going into electronical engineering as well but also that's the main concepts of programming as well um two textual programs they're supposed to

use um so python is the main one that a lot of schools use and I think that's really cool our universities just started using that move from C++ to Python and also binary digits so this is the plan but there is a big problem so we did a lot of research into this and we looked into a lot of reports and we looked at academic and government reports and if you go to the next slide these are one of the reports we looked at this is the UK cyber strategy landscape review report by the National Audit office last one in terms of text on the screen uh shortage of ICT we're focusing on cyber security and how we think

there's going to be a shortage of um it skills and it skills and kids understand how a computer works uh and that's going to affect cyber security so we're trying to get kids more involved with that at a younger age and also that's not the only problem I think one of the other problems is that school I mean the government and the all the educational institutes they are trying to push the national curriculum into schools but the problem is not with them it's with the teachers I mean can can teachers really teach computer science the answer would be no I mean often did a lot of research into this and they have officially made a statement that there's a skills short

as you want ICT teachers um they don't really know a lot about computer science they're used to teaching word processing packages databases presentations Etc so it is considered a big issue so me and Sam compared our education we did ICT never got any guidance in programming it was all off my own back and Sam's own back is all word processing and can they deliver on it no they can't there's a shortage of the teachers that can actually do this even a theory that mathematicians should be teaching computer science so uh that's the main thing what we like to do is we like to have a like sort of an analogy with it where we go a computer's like a car so

ICT is how to learn to drive the car but Computing and program is going underneath the car looking at the carburetor and sort of how can we manipulate the car and change that and for our own uses that's the main idea that we put put forward to it so before we get to the solution what we think what should be done about this we've took some quotes from various academic mix professionals and cyber security and it that we've got quotes from who I network with Sam's network with and who we know personally so the first one is from Dr David day he's at our University of hem uh he's a lecturer in forensics he's also a security consultant for quite a

lot of high-profile retailers he's done some work there um also he's quite prominent in Catching one of the L SE members so he he knows what he's talking about in terms of security right so David learned programming from BBC micro rather than learning ICT like we did and David does agree with everything we said and he he calls students these days code ofic and he believes University students these days are afraid of programming because they never learned it from a young age so now they find it really difficult I mean he also thinks coding is a big part of UK security um here's another quote from this from Dr Nick Blondo he's a cheat software engineer at se one so we've

spoke with Nick um I'm going into a role at se one in June as a pentester and he's obviously he was in higher education before so we've been speaking to him he's talking about how develop a trading materials and they start out inherently insecure I mean it teaches them but they move that on to their Advanced careers and they're already embedded with vulnerabilities he mentions offer overflows SQL injections and we're going to be talking with them about teaching college students if we move into college students in ecpc and uh develop tutorials and exercises that we can teach e safety as well as cyber security as well um so the next quote is from jesser jerox

at critical watch he's the vice president of research there in the USA um I reached out to him we speak on LinkedIn quite a bit and uh I just expected a quote but he actually wrote an article a full article on his blog on this so we haven't got the whole link link to this we just took really important things that we thought were really useful Sam will mentioned these two so jper basically agrees with the fact kid should be learning computer science at an early age he also thinks that kid should you do gamification and play games to learn security like Capture the Flag security Chan Etc rather than just sitting in a classroom

and learning theory but his his and our views do Clash in one point that he thinks kids should choose what they want to learn where we think every student should learn computer science as a mandatory so the next quote is from Chris King senior manager of prod Citrix so I know Chris personally I've been for an interview down at Citrix with him and good friends now uh he mentions micro model BBC micro model computer and uh that's also what David day mentions so we seem to have noticed a theme how when computers came to the masses how programming happened quite early on and then there seems to be a shift in the past 10 to 15 years on ICT and how

you know how to use a computer the programming seems to have come out fashion so we need to bring that back in now especially with cyber secur we can integrate programming like we did before we get cyber security in there everyone benefits the industry and the economy in the UK and that and and he also mentions how Citrix do uh primary age child visits to Campo on campus in Cambridge which is why they're based in citric the next quote is from Darren Fuller at he's the director at set Quest information security so Darren basically knows all about the national curriculum change and he he agrees with the fact kids should learn computer science he also talks

about how kids start from keystage one they learn about basic gooy programming with games and they when when they get keystage three they'll be learning python Visual Basic and more textual programming so the next one quotes from Martin O'neal He the managing dter this is my favorite quote it's really concise and it just sort of sums up what we feel about in terms of cyber security and secure coding he talks about cross-site scripting floors for example in web applications and how like like I mentioned earlier about how um developers when they're learning they don't think about security and then when later on to the creat they need to be retrained and then they're not coding

securely straight away so the next one Peter Collingwood he's Lector Cham University he teaches software engineering and secure coding this was a last minute one uh he does Robotics and teaches kids takes robots in and uh we're going to be doing stuff with steelcon so if you come into steelcon we're doing stuff with with kids there uh cuz we're stem ambassadors we have DPS certificat CES so we can do this and he thinks it's really important and uh all these quotes you can see there's a Blog online that I've set up you can look at um but he he he he feels it's really important he does he works the British Computing Society with this

so two minutes left so what's the solution uh British Computing Society are helping with this uh with the curriculum change we mentioned how teachers may not be able to deliver on these demands for computer science um they're going to be doing £25,000 scholarships which is a massive incentive to get teachers into Computing society and we feel that's really important so e skills UK is also working with the government to create a cyber security learning scheme where teachers IC teachers can go in and they will learn all about computer science cyber security Etc this way they will be actually be knowledgeable and they'll be able to teach students in the coming future if you go on E skills search

Google e skills UK big Ambitions there's a cyber security game there for kids it's really really interesting if you want to look at it and how to teach the kids if you've got your own kids or if you work in schools there's code Club as well which is similar to what we do at ecpc uh it's a not-profit organization volunteer run it's not Nationwide but we need more help from you guys to get involved with this and solve this problem so the government is also working with um institutions who do stop like cyber security challenge Capture the Flag Etc I think it should be more going through the gamification just to learn security rather than going to

Theory and the last one is the really most important point I really would implore you guys if you from a security background or even it get involved with stem net it's free the stem ambassador program more specifically and this is from the UK cyber security strategy report they're going to continue funding stemnet so it's not something that's going to disappear due to funding Cuts because they think it's really important so get involved you get free DBS certificate you can get involved with your local local schools you get a free uh well it's going to reward your CV make your CV better rewards the schools the kids the teachers everyone benefits really perfectly and we use code code.

and scratch and yeah uh thank you for listening um which just been zoomed out on hack on all that so that's sand there uh all the article the quotes are on there on the blog it's a Blog I've just set up uh launched in coinciding with this and our Twitter handles there and Linkedin handles are there any questions yeah