Tuesday was the first day of summer camp at the University of New Orleans, but there will be no letters home to Mom and Dad — this one is a summer camp for teachers. It is the second year of the GenCyber program.
Most summer camps are not funded by the NSA, but GenCyber summer camp is different.
The camp is conceived as a way to teach cybersecurity technology to a future generation of experts. And it uses a somewhat different approach — of teaching the teachers.
For the next two weeks, middle and high school teachers are getting intensive cybersecurity training from UNO computer science faculty, which they can then take back to their schools. Dr. Golden Richard is the director of GenCyber.
"There are not even remotely enough talented people to work on cybersecurity," Richard says. "Anything we can do to get more people into university studying cybersecurity, who can then go out and defend cyberspace, to put it in a silly way, that's what we want."
Richard says, "By training the teachers, we're hoping the teachers will go back and for their entire career, will keep updating their own knowledge and talking to their students about this stuff."
The 20 teachers in UNO’s summer camp are from 12 states, six teachers are from schools in the New Orleans area. GenCyber is funded by the NSA and the National Science Foundation.
