I'm helping build a curriculum for a "test run" of a computing and "cyber" camp at the US Space and Rocket Center. (Huntsville, AL; think Redstone Arsenal)
I've been asked for suggestions on Raspberry Pi projects for us to do throughout the week. The idea being:
every camper gets a Pi with an SD card, charger, etc
throughout the week we learn skills that are put to use in activities involving the Pi
at the end of the week all these activities end in some cool thing that the Pi does
once camp is over the kids get to take the Pi home as a cool souvenir
There are a few conditions:
preferably "G rated." Sadly this probably means no game servers for FPSes or anything. That's out of my control
Suitable for middle/high school kids knowledge level
shouldn't require a ton of knowledge, but also shouldn't be "boring and nerdy." The kids we'll have as campers will be lower middle class with very little experience with this sort of thing. They'll be eager to learn of course, but we don't need to try to teach Linux from Scratch or anything insane like that.
preferably functional without a bunch of expensive hardware (so it's still cool when they take it home)
My ideas thus far: - I thought about some kind of drone thing since we are dealing with the US Space & Rocket Center here, but I'm worried that'll get expensive really fast - Perhaps a retro arcade project, but I don't know how much we can integrate that into "cyber camp" teaching since most Pi arcades are pretty much "push button - get arcade" at this point. - Maybe some basic IoT/robotics stuff? I feel like it'd be super cool for them to use the Pi as a controller for physical stuff, and that fits with the computer engineering/cyber theme, I'm just not really sure what exactly to do for this. I don't want to do something boring like "look, let's turn an LED on and off from a web server" but I also don't want to do something insanely complex that they won't enjoy.
Any ideas are appreciated. I've got a few months to work on this, I just want to hear what you guys think.
You would be able to put stuff on it on a pi. Temperature sensors, Air pressure, maybe some inexpensive gas sensors, UV light sensor, maybe general light sensor. Your general Raspberry Pi weather station basically. All of that stuff gets strapped to a balloon and sent to the stratosphere.
Get a couple of campers to equip as a search party and let a counsellor drive them to the GPS beacon.
Maybe introduce some level of redundancy (live mirroring of data to usb storage, maybe even a second pi).
I do not know how to make these electronics near-space proof but I do not work at a Space and Rocket center ;)
At one shmoocon, some people participated in hunting each other down with (IIRC) RF transceivers. It was something like everyone had the code to one other person, but no one knew who that was. The code activated a shock collar on the other person's ankle.
You could set something like this up with pis, LEDs, IR receivers, and old tv remotes for DIY laser tag. If you want to get real ghetto fab then make each pi an ad-hoc network with a device associated that blinks red if it looses connection for more than a few seconds and tell them to deauth each other. Last man standing wins. Espionage style.
an idea - you could get a Raspberry Pi Zero, turn it into a PoisonTap and use it (in well-controlled circumstances so that nothing illegal happens - waivers can be signed and everything if needed) to demonstrate security vulnerabilities in computers, and task the kids with securing the machine from such an attack - helping them with it, of course.
If this doesn't count as G-rated, I completely understand - you wouldn't, for instance, show them pen-testing in Kali Linux. However, in a world of IoT toasters and lightbulbs with little to no security implementations being peddled out on the market in droves, computer security is becoming an increasingly important issue, and teaching kids about it will give them a huge advantage.
This would be very cool, but I see two potential issues:
What are the legal implications of this? Is a permit required to launch these, and how hard is it to get one?
How does this fit into "cybersecurity"? I definitely see the appeal as far as basic electronics and just general "cool" factor, but I'm concerned I won't be able to convince the folks in charge that this has enough to do with "cyber stuff" like Linux and IP networks.
Does this give the kids anything to take home? I don't know how much this would cost, so not sure we could do one balloon for every kid, plus I'm not sure if there's legal issues with sending a bunch of high schoolers back to their homes in downtown Huntsville with a functional weather balloon.
This might be cool, I'll have to look into this. My only two concerns are:
Will this be too advanced for them? We'll be dealing mostly with kids with no cybersecurity knowledge at all. Like we're talking probably never even heard of IP addresses. So the curriculum needs to play to that.
I don't want any way for us to be responsible for something that might happen if they take this stuff home. News headlines that read "Local student accused of cyber crime using tools from US Space & Rocket Center" would be very bad. But I agree that security is the whole point of the camp, so it's worth looking into.
yeah, I know what you mean. Theoretically, defending from a PoisonTap attack is (relatively) simple - enabling full disk encryption and changing permissions to stop the computer automatically connecting to any wired connection it sees is all you really need to do. But as you said, even that might be a bit beyond the students.
That's kind of the problem I have with 'cyber' camps, because you've got a load of kids who may be really enthusiastic about learning about computers, but when you're just getting your foot in the door like that without a lot of prior knowledge, there's a lot of reading, a lot of research and a lot of 'boring' stuff that goes into learning the ins and outs of computers before you can get to the interesting/fun stuff. It takes months, if not years. Not really something you can cram into a camp.
As far as liability goes, I would have suggested some kind of liability release for the event, but that might be hard to implement so close to the event if it hasn't been done already.
How old are the kids? Edit, nvm realized it stated lower middle class (assuming that means 10ish). Google for 'Hello Ruby' - that'll get you to a site that provides a good base to start url hopping to some projects kids has done, with coding, raspberry pi's and plain computer projects.
You will need a launch permit since that thing will pop up on any radar and will probably not answer any radio calls. There are hobbyists that launch these balloons semi-regularly, they will probably have a forum where they have either written it out or where you can ask.
Cybersecurity? Hm, you did not mention that it should have to do with cyber security. So it's probably: Don't put sensitive information on something that's going to space. This is a general electronics project. And also space. Spaaaaaaaaace.
Depending on what the cost of extra hardware you will probably be able to build a weather station out of that.
IT Security on middle school level is somewhat difficult. What about phishing, lockpicking and physical security? You could do a social engineering role play, equip a camper or counsellor with a callcenter script and give him 5 normal calls and 1 social engineering call to deal with. Social manipulation should be something highschoolers are very good in. As for the pi: Try the pirate box for anonymus file sharing. Maybe combine a file hash verification exercise in with that. You could do some pgp mailing with the pi's. Maybe try something along the lines of catching wifi probes of phones and correlate them with the SSID map from Google.
The kids are going to be middle/high school (probably 13 is the absolute youngest we'd have). When I said lower middle class I meant their family's income, I only said that because I'm trying to avoid projects that they won't be able to use at home (like huge rockets that require consumable fuel and such that they may not be able to buy very often, or things of that nature)