About Me - Experiences
About Me - Experiences
The Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER), produced by KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, is a professional conference designed for elementary, middle and high school students, their teachers and mentors, technology education professionals, robot enthusiasts, and invited professional guests.
The GCER gives attendees the inspiration and experience of a professional conference, encouraging students to further their knowledge, network with other students from around the world and pursue related careers. Teachers and mentors have many opportunities to network, exchange best practices and develop new approaches to STEM education. In addition to guest speaker sessions, breakout sessions and an autonomous robotics showcase, GCER also features several autonomous robotics competitions and events.
We had two teams compete in the autonomous robotics competition.
They had a cool promo video for GCER that they showed at the conference, but it seems like they haven't uploaded the more recent promo-videos online.
I did find one from 2012 though, which was a bit interesting to see. In the video, you can see one of the coaches wearing a shirt that says ECER and IEEE on it. If you want to see more about the design of the 2012 game board, you can see it here.
Dr. Hibshi’s research area includes usable security, cybersecurity education, security requirements, and expert decision-making. Dr. Hibshi is experienced in conducting ethical research with human subjects and her work has involved collecting empirical data from security experts to improve the security of composable systems. Her work is at the intersection between software engineering, usable security, human factors, and AI.
Dr. Hibshi is the research lead investigator for the picoCTF educational platform. Her work focuses on increasing diversity in capture-the-flag security competitions, improving the user experience when using the platform, and enhancing the educational outcome of cybersecurity CTFs. Her work also includes investigating the challenges facing developers and security experts when working hands-on on security problems. Dr. Hibshi is also investigating usable security and privacy challenges facing the field’s developers, experts, and professionals.
As a cybersecurity educator, Dr. Hibshi also investigates how to improve cybersecurity skills in future engineers. Through the picoCTF platform, Dr. Hibshi studies how to attract more talent from underrepresented groups into the platform, and how to create an educational ramp for complex concepts in security engineering such as blockchain and AI.
Nicole Newmeyer is currently the Subject Matter Expert in Internet of Things and Container Security in NSA’s Network Security Services organization; she is leading the coordination and development of Container Security measures and implementation guidance to establish Agency Standards for protecting classified information used in containerized applications.
A graduate of the Agency’s Senior Technical Development Program, she focused on understanding the impact of Internet of Things technologies on NSA missions. Throughout her career, she has held technical leadership positions in both the signals intelligence and cybersecurity missions at NSA, and has led engineering and strategy development efforts to find novel approaches to complex problems and implemented innovative development efforts to solve technical challenges quickly and efficiently.
She is also the chair for NSA’s Women in Technology group, a component of the Women Employee Resource Group, and is an active advocate, leader, and mentor.
Carolina Zarate has been a long-time competitor in CTF (Capture the Flag) hacking competitions since 2011, and has competed with 6-time DEFCON CTF champion, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP) since 2014. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon University.
Carolina spends time providing opportunities for beginners in cyber security, developing challenges, CTFs, and educational material. Her contributions have extended in the past to picoCTF, the largest CTF geared towards educating high school students.
Unfortunately, I did not attend this session. One of our students' robot was having quite a bit of trouble, and I helped find a way for us to roll back the firmware update to the previous version- but it took quite a bit of time unfortunately.
With the competition focused on Cyber Security, this year's GCER had a strong presence from the NSA, which included judges and representatives that provided information to students about possible internships.
Additionally, participants can present papers. One of our students, presented on Diversity in the STEM field.
With almost 40 teams, the competition was divided into 4 brackets based on preliminary scores during seeding rounds. Our teams were placed in the middle brackets. Our teams faired reasonably well in both brackets, but not at the top of either.
We did receive multiple special awards, 1 of 2 awards for Perfect Documentation, the top award for Spirit of Botball, and the NSA: Defend the Network award. One of our couches, Cheryl Wegscheid, also received a special volunteers award.
Additionally, a brand new team this year was struggling to get anything to work. Our students helped theirs, and cheered them on as they ended up being one of the top teams in the newbie bracket.