Engaging Your Children at Home by Learning the Fundamentals of Cybersecurity: NICERC

 

 

You may have been home with your kids for quite a while now. Sometimes they may run out of things for them to do, especially after their regularly schedules schoolwork is completed. However, the National Integrated Cyber Education Center (NICERC) has compiled a collection of educational websites that will allow your children to remain engaged while continuing to learn the fundamentals of cybersecurity.

NICERC offers cyber, STEM, and computer science curricula and professional development to K-12 educators at no cost. Typically, teachers would have to access this curriculum, but NICERC realizes that most of the country is going through challenging times.

Now, parents can access and download lesson plans that will keep the kids busy for hours exploring cybersecurity fundamentals. But most importantly, maybe they will acquire an interest in cybersecurity that may last their entire school career, and even continue that interest after school. The site to access these lessons are located here: https://nicerc.org/2020/03/nicerc-home/

I will not go over all of the opportunities, but here are a few that are worthy of exploring.

• Fact of Fake Website: All Grade Levels: We are inundated with fake news on social media. This lesson will teach students to be responsible citizens as well as learn how to spot fake news and learn to not believe everything they see on the internet.
  • https://trcom/real-or-fake/
• Computational Thinking; Middle School: This site helps students learn computational thinking for science and engineering through an aerospace lesson. They will need an internet connection and some paper.
  • https://nicerc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CT-Paper-Airplane-Lesson.pdf
• Keep it Safe Matching Game: Elementary School: Kids will find it very challenging to match objects to find the best ways to keep themselves safe. They will need a printer and scissors.
• https://nicerc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Keep-it-Safe-Instrucitons.pdf
• Cyber Society – Media Literacy: High School: Students will explore the concept of fake news and its impact on their lives.
  • https://nicerc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Media-Literacy_at-home.pdf
• Traceroute & Network Mapping Demonstration: Middle School: This is a hands-on exercise and will take more involvement by parents. This lesson demonstrates communications between computers. It is for middle school, but high school students will also find this challenging

This is only a small sample of the excellent training available on the NICERC website. Go to the main website, take a look at what is offered for all age groups, look it over and test it out first, before assigning it to your students. This site is an excellent alternative to regular classroom learning and will give them something else to do besides telling you how bored they are.

 

Thomas Russell, Cyber Education Program Manager