With COVID-19, the attack surface for hackers has greatly increased and it is important people know how to educate themselves. Also, cybersecurity is a growing field and it is important for students to begin educating themselves now.
Elements:
About page: why cybersecurity is a socioeconomic issue, about the site and our team Quiz page: get recommendations on how to improve your own online practices (specific to your results) Chatbot: ask questions about cybersecurity, anything from “what is cybersecurity” to “how can I start a cybersecurity club” Resources page: gives more resources in addition to those provided by the chatbot. Resources are on how to start a class/club, how to learn about cybersecurity online, and how to improve your own cybersecurity
One major challenge we ran into was coordinating meeting times to discuss and work on the project since we are all located in different areas and have different time zones. Our team is spread out from the USA (New Jersey and California), the United Arab Emirates, and China (Agnes was unable to add herself as a member of this project on devpost but did contribute!). We also ran into challenges finding a way to code live so that we could see each other's edits. We were using repl.it but it was having issues with Flask and Django which our team had tried to use (we felt like we could have added more complex elements to our site with these languages and did not want to limit ourselves). We also tried visual studios which did not work out either. Ultimately, we were disappointed to realize that we would be unable to utilize Flask or Django to connect python to the website for back end development. However, we were able to use JavaScript to do the "back end development" and create elements like our chat bot and quiz.
We are proud that we have a clean project to present despite all the difficulties we faced in collaborating. Some of our meetings were early in the morning for some members and very late at night for others (1am or even 3am), but we did it! We also think that our site is easy to use for beginners and that it will be helpful in showing people how to get started.
Our team learned how to utilize JavaScript to create a chat bot that scans through user responses for certain keywords/combinations in order to determine the best response to return, how to create some simple JavaScript animations, how to create a quiz that gives customizable results, and a lot about web design. In addition to the programming skills we acquired, we learnt valuable skills about working remotely as a team despite time zones that made it hard to work together.
In the future we are hoping to collect more data for the chat bot that we can use to train it and get more accurate results - applying machine learning strategies. We would also like to migrate the data used for the chat bot and other parts of the site to a database to manage it more efficiently and accommodate larger data sets. We would also like to create a user dashboard and login interface so that people can get customized cyber security results and information when they log in and also sent to their emails (for easy access). Something else we intend to do soon is add more resources to the resource page and add more questions to the quiz as well. Lastly, we would like to get python integration with the site for back end development using either Django or Flask. This was a challenge we had faced on a virtual and online environment. However, we hope to use it to integrate Machine Learning capabilities for the chat bot and customized dashboard. Firebase integration is also another step to take in order to create smooth user log in and account management.