Integration of Cyber Hygiene Learning into Virginia K-12 Computer Course Curriculums 

After gathering data through interviews with a wide variety of people with varying cyber hygiene habits, our team has seen general trends that, overall, people do not know much regarding good cyber hygiene habits.  Strong passwords, secure Internet connections, and online discretion are great examples of proper cyber hygiene.  Our team proposes an integration of cyber hygiene learning into already existing computer classes in the K-12 education system in the state of Virginia.  Within the currently existing K-12 computer classes, students are given a general foundation of computer knowledge to use throughout their education.  Our team aims to integrate cyber hygiene concepts into some pre-existing K-12 classes in a proposed framework where learning cyber hygiene would be seamless with other course content.  For example, in an already existing keyboarding high school class, students could be provided with a few lessons on how to create strong, secure passwords.  Our team believes that this will produce much more people in society who are increasingly aware of their cybersecurity habits and safer from cybersecurity threats. This would be free for all student consumers as this would be merely a pre-existing course curriculum cyber hygiene integration. Our long-term goal would be that this would be an initiative for other school systems throughout the United States to start integrating this content framework into their curriculums.  The results would be a huge benefit for the future of cybersecurity and cyber hygiene. 

What we ask:

Our team is asking legislators to consider our proposal as this course curriculum framework has long-lasting implications for general society.  Students would be more aware of how to prevent cybersecurity breaches in their daily life, and they can carry that to their future jobs.  This is vital knowledge that could lead companies to experience fewer data fraud situations and fewer general cybersecurity issues, significantly reducing the chance of revenue loss for their company.