BCMS Technology!

2007 saw the emergence of the iPhone and the Kindle e-reader. In 2007 the average American was sending more texts than making phone calls. Netflix launched and FaceBook reached 20 million users. 2007 is also the year the average middle school student was born.

Our students were born into a world bursting with technology. According to Moore’s Law and Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, technology tends to increase exponentially, meaning it has been and will be central to our students’ lives, deeply integrated into their daily activities.

This rise in technology means that it’s crucial for our students to understand how to keep their data and themselves safe and secure. Learning about cybersecurity and its history is important even for those who don’t want a career in cybersecurity; this field will affect everyone, no matter their career.

Students were introduced to cybersecurity and encryption, and then connected those concepts to Internet of Things devices. They looked at the history of cybersecurity and its political implications through the 1983 movie WarGames, and then got to practice their decryption skills through a virtual escape room. They finished the unit making connections between cybersecurity and IoT and by making applications to control their IoT devices (the BlueKits).