Our 4th Annual Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference will be held virtually on July 20-22, 2021. This year's theme is "Cracking the Code to Cybersecurity Education".

We invite you to submit a workshop or presentation to the following tracks:

>> Innovative courseware and case studies
>> Tips, emerging trends, and lessons learned
>> Work-based learning, workforce development, and credentialing
>> Hands-on cybersecurity activities

These proposals should be appropriate for 90-minute workshops, 45-minute presentations or panels, or 15-minute short talks.

We hope to gather a wide variety of proposals from organizations and individuals including employers and practitioners from the public and private sectors, non-profits, educators at K-12 schools and institutions of higher education, research centers, and training and certification providers.

VACyberEduCon21 is a virtual conference and we will accept live and pre-recorded presentations (45-min or 15-min sessions only; workshops should be conducted live). Pre-recorded sessions should include a live Q&A segment.

Please consider submitting your ideas for a session at the conference!

Presentation/workshop proposals are due by April 30, 2021.
 

New to the Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference this year - we're introducing a poster track!

Undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to present their cybersecurity related work, along with cybersecurity educators and practitioners. There will be a group of judges who will present an Award of Excellence to an undergraduate student and graduate student. There will also be an Innovation in K-12 Cybersecurity Education award, Innovation in Post-Secondary Cybersecurity Education, and Excellence Cybersecurity Education and Industry Partnership.

For more information on the proposal format, judging criteria, poster topic ideas and more, visit the poster proposal submission site at: https://vacr.io/posters2021.

Poster proposals are due by April 30, 2021.

Also new this year - we are currently accepting nominations for two awards that will be presented at this year's conference.

• Virginia Rising Star Cybersecurity Educator Award recognizes an educator who is new to teaching cybersecurity courses, and who has excelled in the delivery of cybersecurity education.
• Virginia Cybersecurity Educator Award recognizes an educator who represents excellence in cybersecurity education in the Commonwealth.

These awards will be presented annually to educator(s) at the secondary or postsecondary level in a Virginia public school. 

For more information on award criteria and the nomination process, please visit the award site at: https://www.virginiacyberrange.org/Community/Awards.

Cybersecurity Educator Award nominations are due by May 20, 2021. 

In case you missed it, we announced David Oranchak will be our keynote speaker for this year's conference.

David Oranchak has been engineering web and database software for over 20 years. His interests in puzzles, cryptology, and generative creative works developed into a book on Shinro puzzles and a comprehensive web site dedicated to the unsolved Zodiac Killer cryptograms. His expertise on the Zodiac ciphers has led to his involvement with several Zodiac related documentaries, development of cryptanalysis software for the FBI, and the Youtube series "Let's Crack Zodiac."

For more on David Oranchak, check out The New Cryptographers article in Virginia Tech Engineer magazine.