Last month, I attended the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Unit’s Cybersecurity Division (CSD) headline conference on the research they are funding and how it ties to the real world problems DHS is charged with addressing. It was a pretty incredible line-up as the agenda will demonstrate to anyone. I particularly enjoyed the presentation from one of the companies that has received funding from DHS for its project, Comic-Bee, that is developing a simple system for creating learning materials around cybersecurity tied to real cybersecurity workforce development requirements.
The system they’ve adopted is really an incredible integration of everything you need to develop educational materials that are tied to specific learning objectives and good lesson planning technique. The existing NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework is entirely incorporated into the lesson planning tool with the full complement of tasks and knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) assigned to each role in the Framework programmed into the lesson planning mechanism. Once you’ve selected a role and assigned learning objectives under those tasks and KSAs, they have created a whiteboarding system for creating images to go with a narrative, provide multiple narratives that reflect the decisions made by the student, score the decisions that the student makes, and then provide full-color artwork to fill out the decision-tree that you’ve created. It is really an incredible tool for creating cybersecurity training materials, fully implemented and yet completely flexible to reflect real-world scenarios that the trainer wants to use as a training tool.
Foresight learned that we were successful in a a contest Comic-Bee sponsored a contest to generate some additional content for their platform and Foresight participated and won! We’ll try and post that somewhere on the website so people can see it.