Over a three-year period, Cyber-Challenge will involve 1,020 Connecticut teens traditionally underrepresented in Advanced Placement (AP) and STEM courses.

ITEST funding will provide opportunities for them to visit major employers in Connecticut and host representatives from those companies at their schools. It will also help pay for laptops, webcams, and software to support students as they solve Cyber-Challenge problems and communicate with teammates from participating schools. The focus will be on sparking ninth- and tenth-grade students’ interest and achievement in STEM subjects and preparing them for future enrollment in AP math, science, and English classes.

EASTCONN, one of the state’s six Regional Education Service Centers, will provide professional development for faculty on technology tools. Faculty externships—experiential learning opportunities for teachers at major Connecticut employers—are a part of the equation too.

Externships, Resnick explains, give high school teachers work experience outside the classroom so that they can easily develop lessons aligning academics with current workplace needs.

Lights, Camera, Answers
Cyber-Challenge has begun, fittingly, at the newly constructed Connecticut Science Center in Hartford, where students from East Hartford, New Britain, and Waterbury met last month and formed 20 interschool teams, each comprising about six students.

Throughout the school year, Cyber-Challenge teams will come together at vacation academies and Engineering Challenges hosted by local colleges and universities. They will also stay in touch by way of video conferencing and other advanced technology. Their final products will be interactive multimedia presentations that demonstrate their solutions to Cyber-Challenge questions using video, audio, graphics, and animation.

At an overnight convention in the spring, teams will reconvene where it all started, at the Connecticut Science Center. There, they’ll put the finishing touches on their Cyber-Challenge solutions and present them to a panel of industry experts from the four participating companies.

“As some of the largest science and technology-based employers in Connecticut, these four companies have a genuine interest in developing the next generation of scientists and engineers,” says project consultant Lauren Weisberg Kaufman, former vice president of education and training at CBIA. Kaufman will lead this initiative along with Dr. Cam Vautour, president of POD, and Dr. Karen Wosczyna-Birch, executive director of the Connecticut Community College’s College of Technology’s Regional Center for Next Generation Manufacturing.

Partners in the grant include the State Department of Education, Connecticut Science Center, Central Connecticut State University, and the Connecticut Community College System’s virtual College of Technology.

The Connecticut Business and Industry Association was POD's sponsor in its startup years, providing expertise in grantwriting and fundraising, access to the business community, extensive press coverage, and assistance in pursuing public policy initiatives that make Advanced Placement a legislative priority. Beginning July 1, 2010, Project Opening Doors has been operating under the auspices of EASTCONN.