Alabama's STEM explorers is made possible by the generous support of the Holle Family Foundation established to honor the legacy of Brigadier General Everett Holle and his parents, Evelyn and Fred.

Holle, Champions of servant leadership, science, technology, engineering, math, all coming up right now on Alabama STEM Explorers.

Hi, Welcome to Alabama Explorers.

Jaya And I'm here.

Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering with my new friend, Mr. Johnson.

Hey, very good to meet you.

Yeah.

What do you do?

So I'll tell you, I do my dream job.

I teach cybersecurity to high school students.

Wow.

What's cyber like?

That's a great question.

So really, when you define cyber, it just means computer.

So here at A.C.T., we do computer security or cyber security, which is where you have to not only know what a computer is, but you have to do some protections on the computer.

Okay.

What made you want to do this?

Well, um, I've been studying cyber security for several years, and I thought, wow, if.

If only I could teach it at a high school level, that would be amazing.

So cyber security is so fun because it's a new challenge every single day.

You never know what your computer's going to throw at you.

And it turns out a lot of people really need cyber security.

Wow.

Who would have thought that?

So there's a few different things that, um, that you need to know if you're going into.

You got to know what a computer is.

Um, so the different parts about a computer, but, uh, then you can get to know a little bit about how to use a computer and learn a little bit about what are some threats that a computer might face.

You know, if you're if you're living in a house, you want to lock your doors because you don't want anybody to come in and steal stuff that you have in your house.

Yes.

Well, in the same way, if you have a computer, you want to keep it locked down so nobody else can steal the valuable stuff you have on your computer.

So that's that's kind of step one.

You got to learn what is cyber security threat.

And then it goes further from there.

Once I give you a computer, um, cyber security says, Well, can you tell me, uh, what are the threats to this computer?

And there could be all sorts of threats.

Um, just like there might be several ways to get around a lock on a door.

There might be several ways to get around locks on computers or cybersecurity protections on computers in order to get to that valuable data inside.

So cybersecurity is that practice of preventing, detecting and responding to threats that might happen on a computer.

So those are basically the basics.

Those are the basics.

Yeah.

And it goes much, much deeper from there.

Oh, I thought that was is it easy?

I wish it was that easy.

But just like anything else in life, you can study, study, study as far as you want to.

And, uh, you can.

I plan to spend the rest of my life learning about cybersecurity.

I was just about to actually do that.

Yeah, it's, uh.

Has it been a, um.

It's been a long journey up to here, but it's about to be a whole lot longer.

Is there any job opportunity?

Oh, there's so many.

So many job opportunities.

There's actually a big need right now for practitioners of cybersecurity, people who can actually do those things.

And so in the cybersecurity field, you can get any sort of job where it can.

Um, anything that touches a computer also needs computer security.

So you might find yourself in a job of ethical hacking, or you might find yourself as a forensics analyst where you analyze the ones and zeros the files on a computer.

Maybe you want to go into the field of cyber studying, um, the crimes that people are committing right now with ransomware and such like that.

Um, or perhaps you want to be a vulnerability assessment analysts, um, where that's, that's a person where when they're given a computer, they tell you, well, this and this and this could be wrong with your computer.

From a cyber means there's all sorts of jobs.

Wow, that's a lot.

Think I might want to do one of those?

I hope you do.

Yeah, That's just the tip of the iceberg.

What is ethical hacking?

Ethical hacking is well, the word ethical.

There is important because there's a lot of people who hack into computers, who break into computers to steal your valuable information.

Ethical hacking are people who are trained to do that hacking, but they're hired to to hack systems.

So, yeah, a company who is designing a system, they want it to be secure.

They'll hire an ethical hacker to break it for them and tell them how they broke it That way.

Once they know how it can be broken, they know how it can be fixed.

So there's a difference between just regular hacking and then ethical hacking.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Makes much more sense.

Yeah.

And there's all sorts of jobs that you can have in cyber.

So I would really like to introduce you to one of my friends here who teaches social engineering, is somewhat of an expert on the topic.

And that would be Mr. Jamie Reese.

Okay.

Okay.

Hi, Mr. Reese.

It's nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too.

So, what do you do here?

Well, I teach in the social sciences department and of the some classes, I teach us history and government.

But a special class that we teach is the evolution of social engineering.

And this really focuses on the human element of security.

So where we teach about networks and infrastructure here, we also talk about the human element of the protection of of information as well.

So a big focus on this course is just understanding how people are convinced to do things that other people want them to do and not just to do those things, but convinced to want to do those things.

Oh, okay.

So this kind of like psychologically, like, does that have anything to do with.

Yeah.

So we do talk a lot about the the principles of of influence or persuasion.

And there's a lot of psychology that's involved in that and understanding how the brain works.

We talk a lot about Robert and his seven principles of persuasion and and how those are often implemented to be used as levers to get people to do things that in the absence of those influence principles, they might not have done otherwise.

So yeah, a lot of psychology involved in it, too.

Yeah.

Okay.

What made you want to do this?

So I have spent 17 years in public education and I saw an opportunity to become a part of something here at this school that was just amazing.

The ability to be in on the ground work, build on something that is so creative and innovative, was extremely alluring to me as a professional.

And so when I had the opportunity to come over and help to build these courses, I jumped on that opportunity.

So it's been a great experience.

Wow.

What are the job opportunities if I wanted to study in this field?

Well, it's interesting because there are there are professional careers in social engineering as what we would call red teaming for individuals who like to do adversarial simulations that work to to test the physical security of buildings.

So that is a that is one way that this could be used.

But also just to understand the the, the influence that these psychological levers have on individuals.

It helps in a number of fields in terms of working as a psychologist.

So, yeah, so there are lots of different opportunities for people to be able to take this and use this.

And for those individuals who go into a career in cybersecurity in general, understanding the human element as oftentimes the front end of security breaches is something that will help people in any field in cybersecurity that they go into.

Well, all right.

I think I don't know.

There's something I might really want to do here.

I don't know.

That seems really, really cool.

It's a really fun course.

And we we have a lot of things that are really interactive in here in terms of the ability to be able to try to practically apply some of the skills that they've learned and so in our second year now, we're continuing to build the course.

It's been a again, it's something that we've really enjoyed to to build out.

And as we look into our third year, we were really excited about what things are going to look like in the future for the course too.

So I like that like that too.

I have another one of my colleagues I would love for you to meet.

She also teaches in the Social science department and she teaches some really interesting courses.

Our name is Ms.. Watson.

Okay.

Yes, me too.

Hi, my name is Jaya.

Nice to meet you, too.

I'm Carrie Watson.

Watson.

I am a social studies history teacher here at A.C.T., and I also teach science, AP biology and AP Environmental Science.

Okay.

Can you explain more about what you do?

Okay.

Well, it's a really unique mix for your first couple of years of social studies.

We do a history of engineering.

We follow a world history looking at the engineering advancements and the technologies that sort of shape and guide history.

And then the second social studies is the history of cryptology.

And we go back and look through the development of code and ciphers and how that helped sort of shape history.

Okay.

Can we explain more on the the site?

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, the AP is the College Board.

These are electives at A.C.T..

So we have an AP Biology elective and AP Environmental Science elective that I teach.

And we also have AP chemistry and physics as a few others.

I don't teach those.

Oh, okay.

Oh, so maybe psychology.

Psychology.

What's that?

It's the study of the brain and the brain development and the thought process.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So what do you teach in your environmental and all that?

Well, environmental science is a sort of a mix of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy.

And it's all just kind of rolled up into one about how our planet kind of operates and ebbs and flows.

Okay, So humans are doing to that planet how to make it better.

So what are the job opportunities as far as studying engineering and the science?

The possibilities are just wide open.

One of our required courses for science is biotechnology.

So that really kind of directs some of the engineering solutions to life biology nearing and biomedical sciences, which is pretty awesome.

And then chemical engineering, that's petroleum engineering for environmental, civil, civil engineering.

There's so much that would apply in the sciences toward the engineering aspect for our planet, ways to make it better, developing ways to clean things up or develop better products so that we quit making such a mess.

All kinds of stuff.

Wow.

What's the, um, petroleum?

That's a study of looking at the fossil fuels as far as our dependance on dependency on fossil fuels.

Tell me about the history engineering.

It's a really unique course.

In fact, it's really not taught at the high school level.

So it's something that's really unique to A.C.T..

But we do a lot of science labs.

There's a lot of physics in the history of engineering.

In fact, just a couple of weeks ago we had a bridge lab studying some of those ancient design structures and testing them out.

So that's very hands on.

I'm not sure how many history classes have science labs, but that is something that's really unique that we do in the history of cryptology, which comes after that.

Again, it's a lot of hands on with writing of codes and breaking of ciphers and a lot of practice there to develop that.

The ciphers.

When you say ciphers, are we going back to history ciphers?

Oh, so we start even with the ancient time using steganography where they hide messages in plain sight, which we still do today with some of our photos, slides, JPEGs, files and such, we get up into the earliest user cipher, which is a simple substitution.

We learn how to break it.

The key word ciphers.

We get into poly alphabetic.

We work our way all the way up to modern time.

So we study and break down Enigma purple, which was the Japanese machine in Cipher Machine during World War Two.

So we kind of just follow the process of engineering and the technological advancements.

And also then the cryptology, the cipher and code advancements.

So we're really hands on practicing those things and working about solving problems.

That's kind of how we operate.

What other things do you do here?

Well, I am coach for the Scholars Bowl team and we've had a pretty successful run of the last few years.

So I've got two growing teams and we practice four days a week after school and we travel around Alabama and we've been to the Nationals in Chicago back.

We came in second at the small school national tournament last year.

Congratulations to you.

I'm really, really proud of the team.

They've done a fabulous job.

How do you get to go to a city?

Well, we are a state public magnet school, so we are open to any student in residential.

Alabama is by application.

So there's a process that you would go through as far as your recommendation, your transcripts, some your teachers will write in.

There's an interview process.

And so when you go through that application process, those that are selected will either move.

Here we have a residential program, but they live on campus and we also have local students who commute daily.

So it depends on where you be coming from.

If you would move here as a full time resident, what kind of opportunity do I get to come here?

Oh, wow.

I just like the career.

As we mentioned, it is wide open.

There's so much opportunity at A.C.T..

In fact, just I feel like even maybe in here, it's such a privilege and it's been an amazing opportunity.

We are the first school like this in the United States, and so we're hoping that others will follow suit around the nation to help develop future technology, incorporated that into the engineering lifecycle.

And so you will get to work when you're actually starting out.

You get to meet a lot of industry partners.

We have a program called Field Experience, and that's where these engineers and cyber technologists and cybersecurity experts come in and talk to you about their jobs and you get to meet them personally.

And then as you progress through, you get to go out and visit them at the work site.

And then your senior year, you get to go do an internship with one of our industrial partners.

And so you will actually go out as a senior in high school to the work field to experience in an actual hands on work experience.

That's exciting.

That's so cool.

So how do you feel about writing?

Do you like to write?

Well, it's not my favorite thing in the world, but I do think that I succeed in writing.

Okay, well, I was going to mention that with our unique social studies program, we also have a really unique language arts program.

In fact, one of our courses is in technical writing, and that teaches you as an engineer or cyber technology cybersecurity expert to be able to communicate, which we feel is also really important.

So I'd love for you to meet my colleague, Bryan.

She teaches that class.

You ready?

Hi, I'm Jane.

Nice to meet you.

Hi, I'm Bryan.

Hi.

Okay, so what do you do here?

So, I am one of the language teachers here at I teach language foundations for ninth grade students.

I teach technical writing for 10th grade students, and I teach AP language for junior level students.

Okay, so what do you do in your AP?

So our AP class, we focus a lot on analyzing rhetoric and writing about how a speaker might use rhetoric.

Okay, what's rhetoric?

So rhetoric is the way a writer or speaker uses rhetorical appeals or rhetorical choices like word choice, trying to appeal to emotions or credibility to get a point across to an audience.

So if you think about Super Bowl commercials or just Christmas commercials, when you are watching them, they kind of create a desire to by whatever you see, they're in them.

So that's an example of how we kind of look at a commercial and look at the rhetoric and what the speaker is trying to do with that rhetoric.

So what is technical writing and how is that used?

That's a great question.

So technical writing can be a combination of different things.

Here at we talk a lot about procedural writing, and procedural writing can be something as simple as like how to writing, which I'm sure that most people know how to do, like how to tie your shoe, except we do it in different ways with different classes.

So we might have students do an engineering project and then for language class, they might come in and they might write about how they created that engineering project here.

So we just go through all the steps of how to create procedural writing and the audience that we're writing for, and we also write white papers with white papers.

So a white paper is just a like a research paper that you do and you do this and you are moving into different industry jobs like engineering or even cyber.

And it's where you are trying to answer a question and you're trying to think about or sell a product and you're trying to do all the background research and offer solutions so that maybe somebody would want to maybe buy your product or hire you to do a job based on what your solutions to a problem might be.

Okay.

So if I wanted to work in this field, are there any job opportunities?

There are definitely lots of job opportunities for technical writing, and I think that there are unlimited possibilities here in and around the Huntsville area.

For anyone who's interested in technical writing, part of being a good engineer is being able to communicate clearly and concisely and being able to do that through technical writing would be a great thing to do.

I like that.

I think.

I think everyone would love to have you do it.

To tell me a little bit more about technical writing, of course.

So you mentioned like what kind of job you might be able to get with technical writing, and there are unlimited opportunities out there for anyone interested in technical writing.

Technical writing can be specific to industry like engineering partners, but you could also be a technical writer and go anywhere.

You could get a job in marketing, You could get a job teaching technical writing, which is what I do.

They're just unlimited possibilities out there in taking the skills of researching to solve a problem and offering solutions to the world.

So I think it's unlimited.

And to what field you go into with a technical writing background.

So I also teach a class called Foundational Language, which is something that our incoming ninth graders take.

So it is a class where we kind of go over the basic components of any language class that you get at any traditional high school.

One of the projects my students are working on right now is a narrative project where they interviewed each other.

So just like we are, yeah, just like we are.

And so that's an important skill.

So one of the things that I try to teach my students is that it's really important to be able to communicate with all different kinds of people and most importantly, not just the communication but being able to listen.

That's such an important skill to have in any job and in life, really.

So I also teach and sponsor a club here on campus.

So this club is a literary club and it is a student run club.

The students here are so oriented in the STEM fields that sometimes they want to really dive back into the language arts.

And so it's a mix of a creative writing and a book club, and we spend a lot of time talking about books.

And just today they were they are creating their own characters, creamers, their own storylines, and they are just having fun in the creative process.

And I think that kind of talks about how STEM and language arts kind of go hand in hand.

I think they just add value to each other.

So that's one of the many club offerings we have here.

And there are lots of different clubs and activities and the next person who you're going to get to talk to, actually is a sponsor of a couple of different clubs here at school, as well as being the coolest math teacher that you'll ever meet.

Hi, I'm Jaya.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too.

So, what do you do here?

I teach the senior level math, the calculus.

And I have also taught some of the cyber classes in previous years.

Okay.

What's calculus?

What's calculus is a great question.

In your math class, you're figuring out what x is.

X equals four x equals three.

And in calculus, we're figuring out how X is changing.

So how fast is X going up?

How fast is X going down?

That type of thing.

It's the it's the math of motion, so.

Oh, it's coming.

You got about three years, but you'll get there, I promise.

I heard you do a lot of clubs and you do a lot of clubs.

We started the e-sports team.

We play e-sports about three days a week.

EA Sports is playing video games.

It's not for a lot of sports really, but if it's a game on a Nintendo Switch, we probably play it competitively.

I've got a team downstairs playing Mario Kart right now, so games like that, we play some computer games.

It's a statewide competition.

Some of the competitions in the central region of the United States.

So we've got about somewhere between 30 or 40 kids playing.

Okay.

Any other clubs?

I'm kind of the informal sponsor of a board club.

We do board games while we're doing e-sports.

I got a group of kids who like to come play board games in another life.

I've coached every sport in the world.

I don't coach a lot of sports here.

So that's that's the clubs I do here mainly.

So if I wanted to work in this field, are there any job opportunities?

Math is in every job.

Calculus is very specialized.

There's not a whole lot of jobs where they're just going to say, Hey, I need you to do calculus.

But in calculus, we do a lot of problem solving.

So if you can solve a problem, solving, a problem will help you in almost any job you do If you're an engineer.

We have a lot you know, engineering is in the name of the school.

A lot of engineering disciplines use calculus a lot more than, say, a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist or a businessman.

So, you know, if you're in a technical STEM field, characters will come up a little bit more.

Sure.

Why is calculus so important?

Well, campus is pretty much the gateway math course for most colleges.

Calculus is where, you know, if you're going into a really technical discipline, if you can get through calculus, you're okay.

If you can't get through calculus, you know, you'll have to go do something else.

So a lot of a lot of high schools didn't used to offer calculus.

Now almost they all do.

So campuses, you know, AP calculus or AP stats is what you get to when you're a senior at whatever school you're at.

What made you want to do this?

What made me want to do work her It's a great question.

Teach calculus in general.

I've always taught calculus in every school I've been to.

I played basketball in high school, I played basketball in college.

And I like doing math.

So the thing I thought would be cool was teach math and college basketball.

So I have done that all most of my career.

And then coming here, it was just a real neat opportunity.

You know, everybody here is an engineer by here wants to do something and cyber, everybody here wants to play a video game and that type of thing.

And I've been teaching a long time and I'm kind of at the end of the line and this was sort of the whipped cream and cherry on top of the the whole career.

How does math and cyber like go together?

That's a great question.

I teach programing and I teach math and and both of those things, the cyber the cyber teachers will tell you if you can program, if you can problem solve, if you can do some math, it helps you with your cyber.

You know, we're trying to cyber with engineering and there's a lot more math and engineering.

So, you know, if you can't do the math, it's going to be very difficult to solve.

The problems at the cyber and engineering fields are bringing to you.

Well, thank you, and everybody here at ASCTE.

I had a wonderful time learning about this school and everything's just wonderful and amazing.

We'll see you guys next week at Alabama STEM Explorers.

Thanks for watching.

Alabama STEM Explorers.

If you missed anything or you want to watch something again, you can check out our website at Frame of Minds dot org.

Maybe you have a STEM question we could answer here on the show and you might grab a cool T-shirt.

Feel free to send us a video question or email on our Web site.

Thanks again for watching.

We'll be back next week.

Alabama STEM explorers is made possible by the generous support of the Holle Family Foundation established to honor the legacy of Brigadier General Everett Holle and his parents, Evelyn and Fred Holle, champions of servant leadership.