By Theresa Anne Salah

Dr. Nur Zincir-Heywood is a long-time advocate for experiential learning – especially in the graduate and undergraduate network design and management classes she teaches. That’s why she’s been incorporating competitive game-playing into the curriculum since 2005 – pitting teams against each other to attack and defend their networks. If the red team succeeds in infiltrating the network of the blue team and crashing their computer, the red team wins; if the blue team prevents this, it’s victory to that team.

Today, the game is entrenched as a popular and established teaching tool in the Faculty of Computer Science‘s networking courses – so much so that it is getting its own dedicated space. Thanks to a generous donation of equipment from networking technologies giant, Cisco, the brand-new Cisco Network Security Lab is expected to be up and running in the 2014-15 academic year. With new routers, switches, firewalls, intrusion detectors, network management software and virus checkers, the state-of-the-art lab will be open to anyone doing research or teaching in the field of network security.

“Thanks to Cisco, our students will now have access to the most up-to-date tools in the field of networking security,” says Dr. Zincir-Heywood. “They will be motivated to think practically and creatively about security issues and they will form the next generation of thinkers who will build the security systems of the future.”