Developing an Al-Powered Chatbot to Support the Administration of Middle and High School Cybersecurity Camps

Throughout the Internet, many chatbots have been deployed by various organizations to answer questions asked by customers. In recent years, we have been running cybersecurity summer camps for youth. Due to COVID-19, our in-person camp has been changed to virtual camps. As a result, we decided to develop a chatbot to reduce the number of emails, phone calls, as well as the human burden for answering the same or similar questions again and again based on questions we received from previous camps. This paper introduces our practical experience to implement an AI-powered chatbot for middle and high school cybersecurity camps using the Google Dialogflow platform. We selected some frequently asked questions for building our chatbot. Instead of posting many frequently asked questions directly on the website, which many people may not be interested in reading, we feel that chatbots can be a good alternative and provide responses to any user's questions or inquiries in an interactive manner. Our preliminary evaluation of the chatbot shows that the chatbot was well received by those who used it. 29 students filled out a short questionnaire after they used the chatbot. 79.5% of the students agreed that the chatbot was easy to use; 89.6% of them agreed that the chatbot's interface was user-friendly; 89.7% of them thought the chatbot works great and the chatbot was very helpful and helped them answer some of their camp or cyber related questions; 75.9% of them enjoyed using the chatbot. Overall, 82.8% of then were satisfied with the chatbot. We believe that a chatbot can be more useful than a Q&A agent and it can be further developed to become an advanced virtual assistant for both teachers and students. As for future work, we are interested in expanding the chatbot for general questions in the cybersecurity area so that the chatbot can provide standardized answers to more knowledge-related questions about cybersecurity.