What: Vernier Software & Technology’s 2017 Engineering Contest

Who: Middle and high school STEM teachers

Prizes: $5,500 in cash, technology, and expenses to attend either the 2017 ASEE or NSTA annual conference.

Deadline: Feb. 15, 2017

Vernier Software & Technology‘s 2017 Engineering Contest recognizes science and STEM teachers for their creative uses of Vernier sensors to teach students engineering concepts and practices. Two winning teachers—one middle school teacher and one high school teacher—will each receive prizes valued at $5,500.

To enter, educators must complete an online application as well as produce a video that showcases the engineering project in action, describes the Vernier sensors being used, and highlights the engineering concepts being addressed, specifically as the project addresses the engineering practices outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

The sensors may be used in conjunction with Logger Pro software, NI LabVIEW software, LEGO NXT, VEX, or any other system incorporating Vernier sensors.

Applications are due by February 15, 2017 and will be judged on innovation, engineering objectives, and ease by which other teachers can replicate the project.

Each winner will receive $1,000 in cash, $3,000 in Vernier technology, and $1,500 toward expenses to attend the 2017 National Science Teachers’ Association (NSTA) STEM conference or the 2017 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference.

2016 winning projects focused on developing specialized water filters and designing bridges made out of a single material without adhesives.

For complete information on the 2017 Vernier Engineering Contest and to submit an application, visit www.vernier.com/grants/engineering/.

Founded by a former physics teacher, Vernier hires educators at all levels of the organization and is committed to developing creative ways to teach and learn STEM through hands-on projects and design challenges.

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She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. She taught at Harvard, pioneered one of the first computer programming languages, discovered the first computer “bug,” and retired as the Navy’s highest-ranking, longest-serving female officer in history. There’s even a destroyer that bears her name.

In 2016, President Obama awarded her a posthumous Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Hopper didn’t let military bureaucracy inhibit her trailblazing efforts. “If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it,” she famously quipped. “It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”

Coming from a family with strong military ties may account for some of her crisp self-assuredness. The oldest of three children, Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City on December 9, 1906. From early on, she displayed uncommon curiosity, taking apart seven alarm clocks at age 7 to see how they worked before her mother discovered what she was doing and limited her to one clock.

Hopper, who attended prep school, graduated from Vassar College in 1928 and married Vincent Foster Hopper, a New York University professor, two years later. She went on to study under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale, receiving a Ph.D. in 1934, and taught math at Vassar from 1931 to 1943, when, like many other women during World War II, she joined the Navy’s WAVES (Woman Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service). Commissioned as a lieutenant junior grade in 1994, Hopper was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she became the third person on the research team that invented the first computing machine under Prof. Howard Aiken, a naval reservist. “Where the hell have you been?” Aiken asked. Pointing to his electromechanical Mark I computing machine, he said, “Here, compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series by next Thursday.”

Hopper dove in and learned to program the machine, which was 51 feet long, eight feet high, eight feet deep, and had 72 words of storage. It could perform three additions a second. She also assembled a 500-page operations manual for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator that outlined the fundamental operating principles of computing machines. She also developed the revolutionary concept of the compiler, an intermediate program that translated instructions written in English into code understood by computers.

War’s end also brought the end of Hopper’s marriage. (Though childless, she kept her husband’s name.) By then, Hopper was working on the Navy’s Mark II version of the machine. Harvard appointed her to the faculty as a research fellow, and in 1949 she joined a newly formed company that eventually became Sperry-Univac, the computer company. (Photo, left, shows Hopper with the original UNIVAC.)

Like any invention, the early computers had glitches. One was resolved in 1947 by extracting a two-inch moth from Relay #70 of the Mark II, which Hopper pasted into the log book. “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it,” Hopper told Time magazine in 1984. Her work in the 1950s led to the development of the COBOL programming language.

Hopper’s research kept her in close contact with the military, industry, academia and business. Though she had retired from the reserves at the end of 1966, the Navy recalled her to active duty eight months later, assigning Hopper — by then a commander — to the Navy Programming Languages Group, where she oversaw efforts to maintain uniformity among computer languages. She was promoted to Captain in 1973, Commodore in a 1983 White House ceremony, and Rear Admiral in a 1985. Hopper turned 80 the next year and retired from the Navy, but remained active in industry and education until her death on New Year’s Day, 1992.

Throughout her career, Hopper confronted intellectual and social barriers. Some scholars couldn’t envision a machine ever doing more than just counting. High-ranking females were as rare in the military as snow in Miami— and Hopper was a math whiz, too. How did she get ahead in this man’s world? Brains and humor. “Humans are allergic to change,” she once noted. “They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.”

Hopper lived long enough to see her work recognized and celebrated. But decorations weren’t something on which she dwelled. As she put it: “I’ve always been more interested in the future than in the past.”

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Think computer science is only for an elite group of professionals? An Hour of Code could change your mind – and inspire your students!

Join more than 41,000 U.S. schools, libraries, and other organizations to celebrate Computer Science Education Week this year by hosting hour-of-code events from December 5 to 11. (Get how-to details here.)

The “largest learning event in history,” which marks the birthday of computer pioneer Grace Hopper, includes Star Wars-based tutorials for beginners as young as four, inspiring videos about learning computer science, fun Minecraft adventures that children can program using smart phones or tablets, and even “unplugged”Hour of Code activities for people without a computer or Internet connection.  New this year: a free Minecraft tutorial that lets beginning coders create and share simple versions of the popular game while enhancing their problem-solving skills.

Check out these teacher-led activities and other educator resources to get some ideas for your classroom.

No computer science teacher at your school? Edhesive offers a free AP Computer Science massive, open online course (MOOC). It’s one of 14 providers of curriculum, classroom tutorials, and platforms for teaching computer science to kids that you can integrate in your lessons.

Seek more information? The September 2013 eGFI Teachers newsletter focuses on computer engineering activities, as does the eGFI Teachers blog post with computer science education resources.

Meanwhile, states are moving to adopt new computer science education standards based on the K-12 Computer Science Framework. According to the Atlantic magazine. Arkansas, Indiana, and Florida have made major computer-science pushes at the K-12 level, as have cities like New York and Chicago. California is moving to create its own standards, as are Virginia, South Carolina, and Washington state.

Download the full standards or get tips for integrating computer science into literacy, math, and science instruction from the Computer Science Teachers Association, which developed the standards.

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Who May Apply: U.S.High School Students

Deadline: January 1, 2017

MIT’s THINK Scholars Program is an educational outreach initiative that promotes science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by supporting and funding projects developed by high school students.

The program, which stands for Technology for Humanity guided by Innovation, Networking, and Knowledge, is run by a team of undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and sponsored by technology companies and educational organizations. The aim is to make science and technology research and development accessible to all motivated high school students.

Students, working individually or in pairs, submit project proposals of up to 10 pages. Those whose projects are selected will receive:

• Funding: Up to $1,000 in seed funding to purchase materials or equipment to complete their proposed projects.
• Mentorship: Each student will be paired with an MIT student or professor who will act as a mentor through the duration of the project. Mentors will be readily accessible to provide technical advice, moral support, or any other form of assistance to aid students in the implementation of their projects.
• Networking: Students will be connected with industry professionals and academic leaders in their field for project consultations, including prominent MIT faculty, alumni, or corporate leaders.
• Experience: Students will learn how to execute a project from start to finish, gaining valuable technical expertise, professional skills, and confidence that will help them in any career path.

Past winners include a California high school junior and water polo team captain who proposed redesigning the linear solenoid to create artificial “muscles,” and a New York sophomore who designed a therm-regulating polymer glove powered by the wearer’s own body heat.

For the 2017 program, six Finalists will be invited them to MIT. (Photo shows the 2015 finalists on their field trip to campus.) After the trip, three winners will be selected to receive funding and mentoring to build their project. When projects are completed, one individual/team will be designated the “Grand Prize Winner.” The top three finalists also will receive scholarships: $500 for the Grand Prize Winner, $300 for Second Place,  and$200 for Third Place.

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Navajo Code Talkers at the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012

Activity from IEEE’s TryEngineering. Click HERE for PDF of the whole activity.

Summary

Students in grades 3 – 5 learn how alphanumeric symbols can be encoded for many fun purposes. In the first of two sessions, they learn about codes by making their own with a limited number of symbols. They then attempt to break each other’s codes and discover the relationship among encryption, decryption, and shared keys.

Grade level: 3-5

Time: Two 1-hour sessions

Learning outcomes

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Photo of eCybermission 2013 finalists presenting their project courtesy of U.S. Army RDECOM.

This time of year, kids might be getting some really cool action toys, from James Bond to Jessica Jones. But those in grades 6 to 9  might be getting tired of that plastic stuff and are ready to play super-spy detective all on their own.

Their mission, if they choose to accept it: eCybermission.

The U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program is sponsoring an Internet-based science fair that is aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards and can be used to engage students in science and engineering practices.

Teams of 3 to 4 students, along with an adult adviser, identify a problem to solve in their community. Issues should fall into one of several broad categories, ranging from national security to alternative energy and the environment. From there, teams will prepare a “Mission Folder,” in which they use either scientific practices or engineering design process to answer the challenge. Click HERE to learn more about the contest.

Teams must register by December 7, 2016. (Early deadline is Nov. 2, with teams eligible to win a free STEM kit.)  Entries are due February 22, 2016. Build your team today!

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Computer security was thrust into the spotlight a few years ago, when North Korea crippled Sony Pictures Entertainment following the release of “The Interview,” a controversial action-comedy movie about an assassination attempt on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and threatened retaliation against any theater that showed it.

The biggest cyber attack in history prompted Sony to cancel the New York City premiere and movie theater chains delayed or canceled screenings. While fans wondered how to prevent future assaults, David Brumley, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, came up with an answer: train students to be “white hat” hackers — ethical hackers trained to spot vulnerabilities in systems.

“My research team’s goal is to check software for exploitable bugs,” Brumley, director of the CyLab, explained in a blog post. “We want computers to find bugs that attackers may use first, so that those bugs get fixed.” His team is working on tools and techniques that mimic what a cracker can do, so security problems can be detected before the bad guys find them.

Students are part of protecting network systems. “We’re teaching students how to identify vulnerabilities and how to show that they are really exploitable,” Brumley said in an interview on ABC’s Nightline. “We need to teach students to identify vulnerabilities before the bad guys.”

While there are many courses in this growing field of computer security at the university level, the same is not true for high school students.

“Most guidance counselors don’t even know it’s a field,” says Brumley, who was motivated to create a computer security game, along with Peter Chapman and Jonathan Burket, targeted at middle and high school students called picoCTF. The game consists of a series of challenges in which participants must reverse engineer, break, hack and/or decrypt code to solve challenges.

Many computer-savvy students also  participate in hack-a-thons to test their knowledge in real-life hacking situations. Carnegie Mellon students, for example, bested universities and even defense contractors to win the 2017 “DefCon Capture the Flag” contest for three of the past four years.

That victory in the “World Series of Hacking” came on the heels of a Carnegie Mellon start-up, ForAllSquare, winning $2 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Grand Cyber Challenge. The team’s autonomous system, dubbed “MAYHEM,” scans software for bugs and fixes vulnerabilities. ForAllSecure was co-founded in 2012 by Brumley and two graduate students, Thanassis Avgerinos and Alex Rebert. The Pittsburgh-based start-up currently has eight employees.

ForAllSecure team. Photo courtesy DARPA

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The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use provides research and outreach services to address issues of the safe and responsible Internet use. The site offers  guidance for parents, educators, librarians, and others on effective strategies to assist young people in gaining the knowledge, skills, motivation, and self-control to use the Internet and other information technologies in a safe and responsible manner.

Teachers may find particularly helpful the downloadable guides, handouts and posters, including:

School’s Guide to Cyberbullying

Parent’s Guide to Cyberbullying

Student’s Guide to Cyberbullying

SafeKids.com offers tips and advice for protecting privacy and handling cyberbullies, including an online safety quiz for preteens, cellphone safety tips, and family contract for online safety.

Budd:e, part of the Australian government’s cybersecurity education program, has resources for high school teachers,  including videos about what high school students are doing online, malware, scams, and a 20 minute game for students. Click here for the teacher’s guide.

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Creepy clowns aren’t the only frightening things making the rounds this October. Cyber-thieves and other malicious types are waging a secret war to hack into bank accounts, company databases, email accounts, and computer files in order to steal personal information.

With “smart” devices from appliances to automobiles to toys now hooked up to the Internet, people are more vulnerable than ever. Recently, for example, the U.S. government accused Russian hackers of trying to interfere with the election by pilfering email from the 2016 presidential candidates and the Democratic National Committee. Then there are “social engineering attacks” where a new employee or friendly contractor teases out small bits of information that yield a big picture about an organization’s operations and secrets.

To raise awareness of this threat, the Department of Homeland Security designates October as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Its “Stop, Think, Connect” toolkit includes materials for various audiences, including students and educators, as well as guides to social media, phishing and other topics.

For elementary teachers, the Air Force Association’s Youth Cyber Education Program has developed a series of fun, interactive learning modules for students in grades 1 to 6 aimed at raising awareness of online safety and cybersecurity principles.  The Cyberpatriot Elementary School Cyber Education Initiative kits are free, and can be ordered in digital or hard copy.

The Australian Broadcasting Company’s August 2016 Four Corners documentary “Cyber War lays out the extent of the threat.”

Filed under: Class Activities, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Grades K-5, K-12 Outreach Programs, Special Features, Web Resources | Comments Off on No Phishing! Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2016