courses, we determined that we would not be able to simply adapt theapproaches used to develop these survey instruments into a new survey for cybersecurity. Instead,we would need to first identify how students relate to a course in cybersecurity. Therefore, wechose to first perform a qualitative study of students enrolled in an introductory cybersecuritycourse and then use those results to inform our development of the quantitative tool. 14Initial Qualitative StudyOver the course of a semester, we performed 3 rounds of semi-structured interviews with studentsenrolled in an introductory cybersecurity course designed for upper division undergraduate andfirst year graduate students. 7,27 Our goal was to discover those topics and experiences that
system combining textbook-quality content with algo-rithm visualizations and interactive exercises. DSA courses emphasize dynamic processes suchas how various algorithms work. OpenDSA supports presenting such content in a highly visualmanner through the frequent use of slideshows, simulations, and visualizations. Students werealso provided a continuous stream of automated assessment questions and interactive exercises,thus providing immediate feedback to the students on their progress.A pilot study was conducted with students in a Computer Science course at Virginia Tech duringFall 2012. We tested three weeks of content on sorting and hashing in a quasi-experimental set-ting and collected quantitative and qualitative data. The data consisted of