Orange County Public Schools Cyber Security Program

School background.

Orange Technical College’s Mid Florida and Winter Park campuses (OTC) are part of Orange County Public Schools. OTC mainly runs short one-year industry-certified courses that give their students skills suitable for high growth in-demand careers. They started their cyber security program as they recognised it as one of the fastest-growing fields in I.T and use pi-top [3]s and pi-topCEEDs as part of their program.

Solution.

The students at OTCs’ learning curriculum is based around the EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker Certification which is then supplemented with lots of hands-on project-based learning.

The cybersecurity program is built using the Kali Linux operating system as it's the main hackers’ toolkit. The students have a full version that runs on the Raspberry Pi.

Thomas ‘T.J’ Thoss, Instructor for the Cyber Security Programme at OTC said: “I wanted to find an inexpensive product to show students how to build their own Raspberry Pi-based laptop. That was when I found the pi-top [3] and pi-topCEEDs. And the thing that blew me away though was all the software that came with the pi-top that completely changed the way that I teach this program.”

As well as hacking skills their students learn python scripting. T.J said: “I find that python scripting is a very difficult subject for me to teach students. It's hard to keep the students interested and engaged and you know it's programming so not the most exciting thing to learn. But by using the pi-top projects and exercises and all the invention that comes from using the Inventor’s Kit – it’s a much more interactive and engaging way for my students to learn python scripting.”