A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor has received a Google grant valued at $10,000 that will help provide free, cloud-based cybersecurity labs for junior high and high school students in Arkansas.
Philip Huff, assistant professor of computer science and research associate with the UA Little Rock Emerging Analytics Center, received $10,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits from Google’s education grants team.
The credits will be used to host online cybersecurity labs in development at the university.
The online lab environment, known as the Cyber Gym, will be placed on Google Cloud.
“The main benefit of the grant is that it enables us to run the Cyber Gym for middle and high school teachers for most of the 2019-20 school year,” Huff said in a news release. “With the $10,000, we have the ability to run 2,000 distinct classroom labs a month for six months. We are extremely grateful to Google for helping us provide these no-cost labs to students and their teachers.”
Funded by a three-year, $276,424 grant from the National Science Foundation, the Emerging Analytics Center is developing a free open-source, cybersecurity curriculum for students in Arkansas with assistance from the Arkansas Department of Higher Education.
The new curriculum, part of the university’s effort to create a pipeline for students to fill cybersecurity positions in the workforce, is set to be launched this fall, according to the release.
