First use: Introducing information security in high school oracle academy courses

Security education is vital to successfully counter cyber-attacks. While stand-alone computer security and database security courses are offered in college-level computer science degree programs, these courses do not reach all computing majors and are often available only for senior level students. We believe that security should be incorporated into the computing curriculum at every level, including high school computing courses. In this paper we show how to extend the widely popular high school-level Oracle Academy program with security concepts. The proposed curriculum extensions require minimal changes to the current curriculum while introducing students to the security threats in database systems. We provide example database laboratory materials that can be included in a high school database or computer science course. We show that security concepts can be presented to the students even at this early stage of their education. We propose age and education-level appropriate methods, such as computer gaming and social interaction, to deliver the security relevant course modules. We also argue that it is imperative to educate high school teachers on database security topics to ensure satisfactory delivery of the security components.