Effectively Teaching Cyber Warfare To A Non-Technical Audience

This paper describes the Air Force Academy's Basic Cyber training program introduced in the summer of 2011. What makes this course unique is that it is specifically designed to provide a motivational hands-on introduction to cyber warfare to rising sophomores of any major. In addition, this course was designed to be taught by student instructors with faculty oversight. It was designed for a 60 contact-hour laboratory format to students who had only a basic understanding of computers. This course was then given to 83 students in 6 offerings from May through July of 2011. We outline the development of this course, including the topics covered and the resources necessary, for accomplishment. We discuss the student leader background, training, and performance in the classroom. We also examine the results of the course by looking at student feedback and their performance in a capstone scenario. Finally, we outline the lessons learned from this first offering and how we intend to improve the course for future offerings.