Build the system
Solder the components. Wire the bus. Flash the firmware. Watch the LEDs and sensors behave the way the spec said they should.
Cyberange · Cyberbay · Grades 8 to 12
Wire the circuit. Boot the firmware. Hack it. Then defend it.
Transforming STEM education with a classroom-scale phygital cyber lab for grades 8 to 12. By using real sensors, real microcontrollers, and real small-scale industrial models, students tackle real-world exercises that teach them to build a system, break it, and put it back together better than it was.
Why most school cyber units don't work
Students who haven't held the hardware cannot be taught how to break it.
Most secondary-school "cyber awareness" curricula stop at posters and quizzes. Robotics clubs build, but rarely think about what happens when someone hostile is on the network. The two halves of the lesson never meet. Cyberbay is the missing kit and curriculum that joins them.
01
Awareness without hardware
Slide decks on passwords and phishing land flat with teenagers who have already lived through three account breaches. Theory alone doesn’t move the needle.
02
Robotics without threat models
School robotics clubs ship line-followers and pick-and-place arms. None of them ever ask: what if the sensor lies? What if the network is hostile?
03
No safe target
Teenagers are naturally drawn to the thrill of hacking. Cyberbay is a safe space that constantly challenges them while keeping consequences at bay.
What ships in the kit
A working miniature city. Wired with the same protocols as the real one.
Modular benchtop sections that snap together into a small-scale critical-infrastructure environment. Each module is a complete, working subsystem with a real microcontroller, real sensors, and the same wire protocols you'd see in a control room — scaled to a school bench.
What students actually do
Build it. Wire it. Break it. Defend it. Repeat with a harder threat.
Read the protocol
Watch I²C and UART traffic on a logic analyser. Inspect MQTT messages with an open-source sniffer. The protocol is not magic — it is a stream of bytes.
Attack the integrity
Replay a captured message. Spoof a sensor reading. Trick the controller into believing the tank is empty when it is full. Watch the system react to a lie.
Attack the availability
Flood the bus. Knock a module offline. Watch the dependent systems degrade. Discuss what happens when this is a hospital instead of a model.
Defend it
Add an auth check. Sign the messages. Add a rate limit. Re-run every attack. Compare the system before and after. The fix is the lesson.
Document and present
Every project ships with a write-up template. Students hand in: the design, the attack, the fix, and what they would do differently. The portfolio is the assessment.
Progression
Grade 8 to grade 12. One Lab. Five years of curriculum.
The same hardware is the platform for every grade. The exercises scale: physical wiring in grade 8 to protocol analysis in grade 10 to network attacks and cryptographic defence in grade 12.
Sample project · Grade 11 · Two-week unit
The smart streetlight that turned off when it shouldn't have.
A two-week unit that walks one team from wiring a daylight sensor to launching a replay attack on its message bus — and then patching the system so the attack stops working.
Day 1
Wire and verify
Wire the LED, the LDR sensor, and the microcontroller. Flash the daylight-detection firmware. Confirm: the streetlight turns off when the room lights come on.
Day 3
Watch the message bus
Attach the logic analyser. Capture the I²C messages the sensor sends to the controller. Decode them by hand. The "it is dark" message and the "it is light" message are now visible bytes.
Day 5
Replay the wrong message
Use a second microcontroller as an "attacker". Replay the "it is dark" message even when the room is lit. The streetlight stays on. Class discussion: when is this dangerous?
Day 8
Push it further
Replay the "it is light" message at 2 AM. The light goes off. Now the parallel question: who, in the real world, has a reason to want the lights off?
Day 10
Patch it
Add a per-message sequence number and a checksum, signed with a shared secret. Re-run the same replay attack. It fails. The team has just implemented the simplest form of message authentication.
Day 12
Write it up
Each student submits: the wiring diagram, the captured attack traffic, the patch code, and a one-page reflection on what they would change if the streetlight controlled a real road.
Every project ships with a teacher's manual, a student worksheet, the firmware sources, and the patched-firmware reference solution. Run as-is, or remix.
For students
A portfolio that says "I have built one and broken one".
- Real hardware skill — soldering, wiring, breadboarding, firmware flashing.
- Real protocol skill — I²C, UART, MQTT, basic Wi-Fi — read and write at the byte level.
- Real threat-modelling — what could go wrong, who would benefit, what is the cost.
- A shipped portfolio — every project documented and verifiable for college applications.
For teachers
Everything you need to teach a unit you didn't have to invent.
- Lesson plans for every grade, mapped to standard CBSE / ICSE / Cambridge / IB CS outcomes.
- Teacher's manuals with answers, common-pitfalls notes, and assessment rubrics.
- Train-the-teacher three-day onboarding — covers the kit, the curriculum, and the first project end-to-end.
- Maintenance kit — replacement modules, repair guide, and a teacher helpline.
Maps to
- CBSE · class 9–12 computer science
- ICSE · CS / robotics electives
- Cambridge IGCSE · A-level CS
- IB MYP · DP computer science
- Atal Tinkering Lab fit
- NEP 2020 STEM outcomes
Pedagogy
"You cannot teach a fifteen-year-old to think about safety on systems they have never touched. Hand them the hardware. Let them break it. That's when the lesson starts."
Put one lab in a school. Watch students take it from there.
We deploy a lab, run a teacher onboarding, and watch your first grade-11 team replay their own first attack — usually inside a single school period.