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CyberScouts

_{*only available on Android devices}

Password: CyberScouts

CyberScouts is the result of a joint collaborative effort between Dr. Rosengrant and staff at the College of Education and game development students at the University of Central Florida’s Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA). Over the course of several months, students at FIEA worked to develop an educational mobile video game application that could deliver on teaching security awareness, cryptography, network and web security, and other cybersecurity topics to an audience of Girl Scouts. The game is intended for Junior, Senior, and Ambassador levels (Grades 4-5, 9-10, and 11-12). The game introduces Girl Scouts to complex cybersecurity concepts and enhances engagement through playful interactions in a mobile application; currently, the game is only available for download on Android devices.

 

We believe that the gap in the cybersecurity workforce would be substantially addressed if women were proportionately represented in the industry. By getting girls interested in STEM, particularly cybersecurity, early on, we can begin to achieve gender parity in the cyber workforce. By targeting one of the most relevant audiences that need to develop cybersecurity skills - girls interested in STEM - we aim towards a positive ripple effect of greater gender equality for the next cohort of women leaders and innovators. The Girl Scouts organization became the perfect partner to collaborate with for this project due to their long history of instilling leadership, empowerment, and skill development in young girls.

 

Girl Scout volunteers and program facilitators can use CyberScouts as an easy-to-facilitate educational tool that requires minimum technical cybersecurity expertise to run with a troop. This application aligns with the current curricula used by Girl Scouts of the USA, who partnered with Palo Alto Networks in 2018 to introduce cybersecurity badges to girls in grades K–12. Girls at the Junior level will explore concepts relating to network defense, such as threat detection, incidence response, etc. and learn to recognize different forms of walware, including computer viruses, worms, and Trojans. At the Senior level, girls will be able to perform threat mitigation by encapsulating data to neutralize viruses and safeguard their system. Finally, at the ambassador level, girls will get to learn about cryptography, the technique of securing protected information derived from mathematical concepts. In the game, players are presented with encrypted messages and are required to use their knowledge of various ciphers and encryption protocols to deduce the encryption process and decrypt the information.