Bducators learn to teach cyber across all subjects

Group helps schools ready kids for jobs that don’t yet exist.

AUGUSTA — Brian Case looked over his coding for his Arduino robot with deep concentration. The head of school at Westminster Schools of Augusta said learning the process was like learning another language, but students at his school and others will be able to pick up on it much faster.

Case and a handful of teachers from the lower and upper schools at Westminster participated in hands-on learning experiences from the National Integrated Cyber Education Research Center. Upper school teachers for students ninth grade and above learned to code and build robots, while lower school teachers for kindergarten through eighth grade participated in an egg drop where they built a device to successfully drop an egg without breaking it.

Based out of Bossier City, La., NICERC strives to organically grow the cyber workforce by integrating science, technology, engineering and math lessons into everyday curriculum in K-12 schools.

“We began introducing students to career and degree opportunities that may not exist today, and solve a demand for a cyber-literate workforce. No matter what industry they’re going into, that’s where the demand lies,” said Kevin Nolten, NICERC director. “When we ask them what they want to be when they grow up, we want to make sure they have the best educated response.”

According to Fort Gordon Alliance director Tom Clark, the U.S. will have a 1.2 million employee shortage in cyber-related work if students are not groomed to take on these roles. Cyber security jobs coming to Augusta and Fort Gordon will be available to some students right after high school. Schools are preparing teachers to wrap cyber lessons into all parts of the curriculum, not just math and science.

“The subject-experts think about how they bring this into their classroom,” Westminster’s director of advancement Andy Lee said. Even subjects like art can be used to help teach cyber, according to Lee.