main repository for project development
Despite a steadily increasing demand for skilled IT professionals in the United States workforce, less than half of American High Schools offer courses in Information Technology and Computing. This disparity between supply and demand could be reasonably seen as an underestimation of a potential employment rate increase, and innovation in the IT field as a whole. Our proposed solution to this issue is a streamlined, self-contained IT sandbox environment utilizing linux as the host operating system to help teach the foundations of computing. This will be accomplished by delivering guided challenges of varying difficulty designed to develop a user’s problem solving skills in a digital environment via programming and fundamentals of cybersecurity. These challenges will range from simple walkthroughs of system tooling such as basic linux commands and scripting, which will be compounded upon to complete more difficult or involved challenges; to exploring and executing system security exploits from an offensive and defensive perspective to keep students engaged and excited about their education. The system hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi board that will serve as the computer itself, a MicroSD card containing our operating system, and a case with a built-in display to minimize setup and configuration, keeping the system simple and focused on delivering an interesting and quality foundational learning experience. This system would allow for schools to easily offer computing / IT education to students, potentially inspiring more of them to further their education in Information Technology and contribute to society in highly applicable and meaningful ways.