Security Education and Awareness for K-6 Going Mobile

Abstract

Nowadays, due to widespread participation of elementary school children in cyberspace activities, basic cybersecurity education and awareness is deemed necessary. Within this context, knowledge acquisition in this timely and important field has greater chances to be more fruitful when the learner is properly motivated. Also, it is anticipated to be more joyful when knowledge is acquired in the form of a digital game-based activity. The paper at hand discusses the development of a novel mobile app called CyberAware, destined to cybersecurity education and awareness. At present, the game is designed for K-6 children in order to support either or both formal or informal learning. Additionally, due to its mobile characteristics, the game can be experienced as an outdoor or classroom activity. Finally, opposite to similar studies found in the literature so far, our attention is not solely drawn to game’s technological aspects but equally to the educational factor. This is achieved through the consideration and use of the ARCS motivational model already from the game’s design phase.

Understanding parents' perceptions of children's cybersecurity awareness in Norway

“…Another interesting finding is some specific concerns about online content. While in the literature we have seen researchers mostly focusing on issues like pornography [Ahmad et al 2019;Maoneke et al 2018;Wisniewski et al 2017b], age-inappropriate contents [Kritzinger 2015;Muir and Joinson 2020;Zhao et al 2019], and spam [Giannakas et al 2016;Martin et al 2018], here some parents (7/25 parents) mentioned that children also need awareness about reliability and credibility of online contents; fake or real, intellectual property rights, what is legal and what is illegal with the online contents. Some parents have expressed their concerns about how online contents can affect children with a bad and negative influence.…”

Raising internet security and privacy awareness in primary and early secondary education via mobile gamification

“…This GDP is considered to provide strong motivational characteristics to the learners (Jonker et al, 2009). In the literature, quick games are used to deliver burst-knowledge experience to the students (Giannakas et al, 2016). This kind of games are also known as casual or mini-games and combine characteristics, including short and flexible time duration (quick session), easy access through quick screens, and others.…”

“…When the player attacks on a monster she must answer a number of chemistry pop-quiz questions based on the above mentioned topics. Another example in this category is the CyberAware (Giannakas et al, 2015(Giannakas et al, , 2016(Giannakas et al, , 2018b. This game is devoted to cybersecurity education and awareness and consists of three mini-games for the sake of familiarizing students with fundamental issues regarding cybersecurity technologies.…”

“…This is however quite expected having in mind that the porting of, say, an iOS app to Android is not straightforward and requires significant effort devoted to both coding implementation and testing. In this direction, cross-platform implementation as that in CyberAware (Giannakas et al, 2015(Giannakas et al, , 2016, will assist on building apps that will be suitable running on different platforms and it is sure that will extend the game's life span. This fact alone underpins the need for developing standards and common frameworks for use in this particular area.…”

“…54-58). IEEE.3 Giannakas, F.,Kambourakis, G., Papasalouros, A., & Gritzalis, S. (2016). Security education and awareness for k-6 going mobile.…”