Engaging Secondary Students in Computing and Cybersecurity

Institutions of higher education (IHE) have missions that include outreach to the potential pipeline to college, i.e., working with K12 students and teachers. In that vein, High Performance Research Computing at Texas A&M University has offered summer camp opportunities for secondary students since 2017. Each year staff members work to find better ways to engage students deeply in the activities and learning opportunities. For this paper, we chose to analyze the students' daily reflections to investigate evidence of student engagement and what promoted this engagement. Through thematic analysis, four main themes emerged: real-life applications, curiosity, collaboration, and problem solving. By providing experiences that immerse students in activities that are relevant to their everyday lives, create intellectual curiosity, facilitate collaboration, and present problems to be solved, students became deeply engaged in the learning. In a post-camp online activity three months later, students gave amazing examples of what they were doing to apply their learning and delve deeper into cybersecurity learning.