The Environmental and Spatial Technology initiative that has long focused on providing Arkansas students with the means to solve community problems using technology is now expanding into cybersecurity.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson helped begin a daylong program on Monday at the Environmental and Spatial Technology facility in west Little Rock, where middle and high school students received training on identifying and defending against attacks on electronic network systems.
Environmental and Spatial Technology leaders applied for and received a $20,000 grant from AT&T to support Monday's session and one other this year, both of which are being taught by the Arkansas Air National Guard unit led by Maj. Scott Anderson.
About 20 students from 10 schools across the state heard from the governor, Anderson, Environmental and Spatial Technology President and Chief Executive Officer Matt Dozier, and AT&T Regional Director Ron Dedman before moving to another room to rows of tables and laptop computers.
"We have different scenarios we'll be running them through, different labs," said Anderson, director of operations for the Guard's cyberspace squadron at Little Rock Air Force Base, about the training. "We'll talk about the different career paths in cybersecurity, and we'll be talking about some cyber concepts that we use in the military."
Hutchinson, a former undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, praised the Environmental and Spatial Technology program for its emphasis on technology instruction, which helped inspire his push for all Arkansas high schools to teach computer science and coding. This year there are more than 6,100 students in those computer science courses, he said.
"This is a huge success story in our state and we want to build on that," Hutchinson said in challenging the Environmental and Spatial Technology students at Monday's session to go back to their schools and advertise to their peers about the thousands of jobs that are and will be available in computer science and computer coding-related fields.
While the potential for jobs is one reason for learning about cybersecurity, the governor added, cybersecurity defenders are needed to protect the nation from unauthorized access to personal information, from financial theft, from disruption of fundamental systems including the election system, and from attacks from agents outside the United States.
Also as part of Monday's program, Enge Dorsey, an 11th-grader at Harrison High School, was recognized as the winner of a recent Environmental and Spatial Technology competition to crack a code embedded in a website.
Efforts by the Environmental and Spatial Technology initiative, the Air National Guard and others come after Hutchinson and the state Department of Higher Education announced in October the awarding of a $500,000 grant to the University of Central Arkansas to develop a "cyber range," which is a simulated online system that enables students at UCA and throughout the state to practice identifying and defending against cybercrimes without disrupting the Internet.
"The future is cyber. Everything is cyber these days," Anderson of the Air National Guard said Monday. "It's a matter of finding people who want to go into that career field. We hope we can get them identified early and grow them."
Metro on 01/30/2018