2026 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

Have you ever considered using a live Jeopardy-Style Capture the Flag as an in-class quiz? Would you like to see what this looks like in action? Many teachers have started gamifying their classroom evaluations and quizzes, and even using CTFs for some exams! For your light weight pop-quizzes, CTFs can turn quizzes into a fun head-to-head "Event", with a projected scoreboard for the whole class to see, or even allow competitive teams! For big exams, you can force individual play, and keep things private with no teams or scoreboard. It's time scoped, and you get the scores with all logged submission attempts, which you can then easily turn into grades.

The Cyber Range is considering adding more CTF quizzes to some of our curated curriculum, and this is the first quiz-set. This first release of six quizzes to go along with the with our Cyber Basics course, with a separate CTF for each of the six modules, A-F. Here's the invite into our CTF Quizzes Workshop environment: 
https://go.vacr.io/ctf-quizzes-workshop 

Come check out our workshop, help beta test our first course CTF quizzes, see how you like them and let us know what you think! After our workshop, take your login back to your hotel room and finish UP all six modules to see how you like them and see who wins!

If you have any suggestions, let us know my filling out this quick survey:
https://go.vacr.io/cyber-basics-ctf-survey

Students are already making cybersecurity decisions every day, whether they realize it or not. They are choosing what to share, who to trust, which links to click, what permissions to allow, and how much of their location, identity, and attention to give away through the apps they use constantly. This 90-minute workshop reframes threat modeling as a practical life skill by using familiar consumer apps such as TikTok, messaging platforms, dating apps, delivery services, payment apps, gaming accounts, school portals, and AI tools.

Participants will work through lightweight, student-friendly threat modeling activities focused on realistic scenarios involving fake accounts, geolocation leakage, account takeover, image misuse, social engineering, data collection, and cross-platform manipulation. The goal is to make cybersecurity feel relevant, human, and immediately usable. Attendees will leave with adaptable classroom activities, discussion prompts, and a framework for helping students think more critically about digital risk in the spaces they already occupy.

GT Edge AI will be presenting on Build Your Own AI Cyber Home Lab powered by Dell and NVIDIA!

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming cybersecurity. However, its greatest impact on education may not be the addition of new AI courses or technologies. As AI evolves from a productivity tool into an intelligent collaborator, it challenges long-held assumptions about what students should learn, how they learn, how they are assessed, and which foundational skills will define the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Preparing students for this future requires more than updating cybersecurity curricula; it requires rethinking the educational experience itself.

Drawing on lessons learned from the ongoing evolution of GMU’s cybersecurity engineering programs, this keynote explores the opportunities, challenges, and difficult tradeoffs involved in redesigning cybersecurity education in the age of AI. Rather than presenting a single institutional model, it proposes a practical framework of design principles that educators, academic leaders, industry partners, and policymakers can adapt to their own educational contexts while preparing students for an increasingly AI-driven profession.

This 90-minute workshop provides a comprehensive blueprint for organizing, managing, and scaling a successful student-led Capture the Flag (CTF) program. Led by the team behind the Valentine-themed GMU HackFax x PatriotHacks and Marvel-themed HackFax 2025 CTFs.
Timeline & Breakdown:

• 00:00–00:20 | Story & Organization: Narrative on growing a student-led CTF to a 10-category operation, managing a 72-hour event, and securing strategic partnerships with AWS, Virginia Cyber Range, and other companies.
• 00:20–00:35 | Collaboration Ecosystem: Best practices for managing cross-organizational workflows between student clubs, development teams, faculty, and sponsors.
• 00:35–01:00 | Challenge Development: An inside look at the design process for different categories from development to deployment. The team will also break down how challenges were documented so anyone could learn them and how 3 skill levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced were accommodated for.
• 01:00–01:15 | Blueprints & Lessons Learned: Actionable recommendations, platform bottleneck takeaways, and a browser-based showcase of the Virginia Cyber Range Cloud CTF interface to demonstrate rapid deployment.
• 01:15–01:30 | Open Q&A Panel: Interactive floor with the CTF Development Team to answer audience questions regarding scaffolding, scaling, and student engagement.

 
Technical Requirements
- Laptop with stable network connection
- Virginia Cyber Range Account with ability to join Cloud CTF via browser