Human-AI Partnership Activities for K-12 Cybersecurity Education
From the NICE K12 Cybersecurity Education Conference 2025
Three complete, classroom-ready activities, each with four grade-band versions spanning K-2 through 9-12, designed to reshape how students understand AI in cybersecurity.
The Core Idea
These activities guide students beyond viewing AI as merely a tool and toward understanding it as a collaborative partner in cybersecurity work.
| Old Thinking | New Thinking |
|---|---|
| Humans use AI tools | Humans and AI work as teammates |
| AI is either adversary or tool | AI serves as a collaborative partner |
| Individual competency matters | Partnership capability matters |
Cybersecurity depends on humans and AI working in concert. Students benefit from understanding what each partner contributes, as well as what neither can accomplish alone.
This framing draws from posthuman educational theory, which challenges us to see technology not as something we simply use, but as something we work with. Rosi Braidotti’s foundational work and Catherine Adams’ practical heuristics for “interviewing digital objects” inform how these activities position AI as a collaborative teammate with distinct capabilities and limitations.
The Three Activities
For the NICE K12 Cybersecurity Education Conference, we developed three concrete activities to demonstrate this approach. Each includes variations for different gradebands. Each activity comes with complete lesson plans, student materials, assessment rubrics, and strategies for classrooms with limited technology access.
| Activity | Focus | Grade Bands |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Security Detective Teams | Combining AI pattern recognition with human contextual insight | K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 |
| 2. Ethics in Automated Security | Developing governance frameworks for AI security systems | K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 |
| 3. AI-Assisted Incident Response | Coordinating team roles alongside AI under time pressure | K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 |
Supporting Materials
Assessments
Rubrics designed around human-AI collaboration competencies, with explicit connections to the NICE Framework.
Implementation Guides
Practical guidance for AI platform setup alongside strategies for classrooms with limited or no AI access.
Career Connections
One-page handouts that link each activity to authentic cybersecurity career pathways.
Printables
Ready-to-print worksheets, evidence packets, and AI response cards for immediate classroom use.
Framework Alignment
Every activity connects to NICE Workforce Framework Work Roles and CYBER.org K-12 Standards. Individual activity pages provide specific alignment details.
For CTE Cybersecurity Programs
These activities align directly with Career and Technical Education pathways:
| CTE Need | How These Materials Help |
|---|---|
| Industry-aligned skills | Activities mirror authentic SOC workflows and incident response procedures |
| NICE Framework mapping | Every activity explicitly connects to Work Roles (Defensive Cybersecurity, Incident Response, Cybersecurity Policy and Planning) |
| Career exploration | One-page career connection handouts link activities to real job pathways |
| Employer expectations | Human-AI collaboration is now standard in enterprise security operations |
The 9-12 versions provide technical depth appropriate for cybersecurity pathway courses, while 6-8 versions work well for exploratory CTE programs.
For Outreach Programs
Research centers, universities, and community organizations can deploy these materials with K-12 partners:
- Turnkey delivery — Complete lesson plans require minimal customization
- Scalable — Works for single classroom visits or semester-long partnerships
- Flexible technology requirements — Low-resource options mean any partner school can participate
- Assessment-ready — Rubrics help document learning outcomes for grant reporting
- Train-the-trainer friendly — Materials are detailed enough for partner teachers to run independently
STEAM Integration
These activities connect naturally across disciplines:
- Science — Pattern recognition, hypothesis testing, evidence analysis
- Technology — AI systems, cybersecurity tools, network concepts
- Engineering — Systems thinking, incident response procedures, policy design
- Arts — Communication design, stakeholder messaging, ethical reasoning
- Mathematics — Data analysis, probability (false positives), timeline reconstruction
The investigation and policy design activities work especially well in interdisciplinary or project-based learning contexts.
About These Materials
These resources were developed for the NICE K12 Cybersecurity Education Conference 2025 session presented by Ryan Straight, Rob Honomichl, and Paul Wagner from Cyber Operations in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona.
Contact: ryanstraight@arizona.edu
ORCID: 0000-0002-6251-5662
These activities function effectively at any level of AI access, including none at all. The Low-Resource Implementation Guide offers strategies that frequently produce richer learning experiences than live AI access.