Secure Coding and Ethical Hacking Workshops with NAO for Engaging K-12 Female Students in CS

Abstract

This research work is based upon the new Microsoft DigiSpark outreach project initiated by the computer science (CS) program at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay (UWGB) in an effort to engage K-12 female learners in CS. It describes our unique experiential learning approach combining robotics and cybersecurity, which has been adopted in the outreach workshop sessions as part of our project. Our project involves the use of the NAO humanoid robots in order to successfully engage middle-school and high-school female students, who are underrepresented in CS. These outreach workshop sessions have exposed the young female participants to defensive computer programming, and computing security topics by providing them the hands-on opportunity to write secure code for programming the NAO, and to carry out an ethical hack on the NAO in order to explore robotic system vulnerabilities. Existing literature shows that there is limited work on the efficacy of teaching secure-coding and ethical-hacking related computer-security topics using a robotic-platform. Prior work indicate that a robotic-platform can be an effective and engaging medium for teaching computer-security. However, our proposed approach of teaching secure coding and ethical hacking through hands-on exercises with NAO is a first-of-its-kind experiment with female students at the K-12 level. As preliminary evidence of the effectiveness and potential of this novel approach, we discuss our preliminary experimental results, including initial participant interests and survey data, from the multiple NAO secure coding and NAO ethical hacking workshop sessions, which we have conducted with high-school and middle-school female learners.