West Point Cybersecurity Cadet Capstone Projects: A Beginners' Guide to Teaching and Learning about Cybersecurity

No ratings

Presented at AnyconAlbany 2018 by

Ernest Wong

As part of their senior year capstone engineering experience at the United States Military Academy, fifteen Cadets worked on cyber-related projects to help the US Army better understand the prominent role the cyber domain will have on tomorrow’s battlefields. Despite the apprehension each had when they discovered they would be working on these unfamiliar tasks, the Cadets leveraged their individual strengths, talents, and aptitudes across their varied academic majors (including Russian, Mathematics, Defense Strategy, Sociology, Management, and Psychology) and developed into cohesive teams that gained both an improved understanding of our nation’s cybersecurity challenges and greater insights into how our Army is tackling the challenges. Recognizing that in order to produce value-added solutions to complex problems, the Cadets needed to gain as many insights as they could from differing perspectives. Through their own diverse backgrounds and unique insights, the Cadets were able to apply a systems engineering problem-solving methodology to advance our Army’s approach to cybersecurity. This presentation focuses on how we engineered the team composition, leveraged Army needs to craft the research problems, developed learning outcomes for this capstone experience, and introduced key cybersecurity concepts to undergraduate Cadets.