Robotics has surged in popularity recently for prospective computer scientists and engineers.
But a new subject is growing in popularity as the world grapples with online security. Students in Farmington are learning how to keep the world safe as future cyber warriors.
Cybersecurity protects systems, networks and programs from digital attacks designed to access, change or steal information and data or damage systems.
Middle school students at the Farmington STEAM Academy and both Farmington high schools are joining CyberPatriot teams to solve real-world information technology problems through virtual competitions.
The National Youth Cyber Education Program is a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program of the Air and Space Forces Association and was created in 2009 for K-12 students interested in careers in cybersecurity and other science or STEM disciplines.
Nationwide CyberPatriot competitions began the same year and have expanded to include Europe and Australia.
A middle school team was created six years ago at the STEAM Academy by parent-coach Jerry Gee, and Jason Canfield has been coaching teams at Farmington and North Farmington High Schools for four years.
Heidi Gee, Nolan Barker, Shaila Cranson and Riya Chava make up one of five teams at North Farmington. They placed fifth in a statewide competition in December.
Canfield, who teaches cybersecurity and web design at both schools, said he began with two teams four years ago and now each has five teams.
Farmington is one of four school districts in Oakland County with CyberPatriot teams. Wayne County also has four districts with teams. There are three in Macomb County
Competitions have teams of four or five students acting as newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. Through a series of rounds, teams are given virtual Windows and Linux-based operating systems and are asked to find and fix security vulnerabilities while maintaining critical services.
"There are around 20 vulnerabilities on each system and they have to figure out which vulnerabilities out of thousands that are possible on the system and correct them as best they can," Gee said of the competition rules.
"The hardest part is just finding the problems because it just takes a little bit of work to try and fix them," said Barker, a sophomore. "But you don't know how many problems there are and that is a big part of cybersecurity."
Teams are given four hours to work remotely and complete as many tasks as possible and receive points when they fix vulnerabilities. They lose points if their actions make a system less secure. Teams also gain points by answering forensics questions about actions they took to fix the vulnerabilities.
Some rounds include networking challenges in the form of quizzes and teams can track their scores in real time.
Heidi Gee, a sophomore and team captain, said her team is not focused on outperforming their competitors.
"It is more like getting the knowledge, getting the experience and how we place comes after that," she said.
"This is still really fun and enjoyable and less about motivating yourself," said Barker. "We are genuinely enjoying this and we want to keep going with it to see how well we can do."
Jerry Gee, Heidi's father, also downplays the competitive aspect to his middle school team.
"I would rather have them lose a couple of places and learn what they are doing than be turned off by the competition part of it and not want to come back again next year," he said.
Jerry Gee said he recruits most of his middle school team through the elementary level robotics teams in the district.
Canfield said students join his teams through his cybersecurity class and friends and siblings of those already on a team.
"It has grown on its own through word of mouth with kids from my class bringing in friends to see what it was all about," said Canfield. "There are STEM concepts involved, but it draws kids who are interested in computer programming, cybersecurity and networking. It is a niche group of kids that are interested in it."
All three North Farmington students are planning to make careers in computer science.
"I don't know whether I want to go directly into cybersecurity, but computer science is an option," said Chava, a freshman who along with Heidi has been competing since middle school. "But the skills you learn in cybersecurity are necessary for things like computer science and coding."
"Cybersecurity is adjacent to something I would really like to go into which is computer science," said Barker. "It is also just a really good skill in life to know that the computer you are working on is secured and you are not going to get hacked if you go to a malicious website by accident."
"Cybersecurity is a field which I am very strongly considering because of this program," said Heidi Gee.
Even if students do not pursue careers in information technology or cybersecurity, Jerry Gee said the knowledge gained by all the students can still be useful.
"The CyberPatriots is definitely a good introduction for any kid to get an understanding of what cybersecurity might be like," he said. "Even if they choose a major outside of computer science, they are going to be trained on basic cybersecurity skills for any job that they do in the future."
©2024 The Oakland Press, Sterling Heights, Mich. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
