This project establishes a multimedia-based virtual classroom with a virtual lab teaching assistant for the education of cyber physical system (CPS) security. Such a virtual classroom helps college students in resource-limited rural areas to learn the latest CPS security knowledge via an on-line peer-to-peer learning environment with other students from larger schools. This project includes three novel contributions: (1) all learning materials embrace an application-driven learning approach, with examples from diverse areas such as healthcare, renewable energy, and industrial controls used as the basis for CPS attack analysis; (2) with the help of a multimedia company, the project is building interesting virtual classroom lectures; and (3) to meet the open access lab requirements, the project is building interactive virtual lab helper software to enable remote students to conduct virtual hardware lab experiments and obtain help using multimedia tools. The design encourages innovative learning in several ways: developed labs require an iterative process with idea incubation to force students to follow a more mature creative design process; all labs intentionally include some ambiguity to encourage the search for multiple answers to a single problem; and the 3E (Explain-Exploit-Explore) based pedagogy is adopted for all CPS security labs/projects. The basic level labs emphasize concept explanations. The intermediate level senior projects require students to exploit previous knowledge to perform a multidisciplinary CPS security task. The advanced-level labs require independent exploration to reach creative solutions. The resulting teaching methodologies can be extended to other rural colleges and this project uses a proactive dissemination plan to achieve this aim.
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