Blogs (4) >>
Fri 22 Mar 2024 16:35 - 17:00 at Meeting Room D136 - Visual Approaches Chair(s): Joel Adams

Role-playing and visual interfaces are vital in computer science education, notably cybersecurity, where a concrete understanding of defensive and offensive strategies matters. In this work, we implemented a cryptography education tool combining real-world scenarios, role-playing and visual interfaces to simplify cryptography education for K-12 students. This tool covers symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and secure hashing algorithms, which are fundamental to principles like confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. Our tool’s core idea is to simulate a cryptographic transaction between a user and a bank while an attacker tries to compromise the communication. Within this role-playing and visual environment, students step into the roles of both the user and the bank, using an intuitive visual interface to perform essential cryptographic operations and grasp the underlying concepts. We evaluated our educational tool on 58 students (41 middle and 17 high school students), measuring comprehension via a survey. Our analysis revealed that middle and high school students could readily understand the key operations related to symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, and hashing using our role-playing tool. Nearly all participants expressed satisfaction with the tool and were willing to recommend it to others.

Fri 22 Mar

Displayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change

15:45 - 17:00
Visual ApproachesPapers at Meeting Room D136
Chair(s): Joel Adams Calvin University
15:45
25m
Talk
Analyzing-Evaluating-Creating: Assessing Computational Thinking and Problem Solving in Visual Programming DomainsGlobal
Papers
Ahana Ghosh Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Liina Malva Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Adish Singla Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
DOI
16:10
25m
Talk
Recursion in Secondary Computer Science Education: A Comparative Study of Visual Programming ApproachesGlobal
Papers
Sverrir Thorgeirsson ETH Zurich, Lennart Lais ETH Zürich, Theo B. Weidmann ETH Zurich, Zhendong Su ETH Zurich
DOI
16:35
25m
Talk
Visual CryptoED: A Role-Playing and Visualization Tool for K-12 Cryptography Education
Papers
Pranathi Rayavaram University of Massachusetts Lowell, Sahithi Charitha Dindukuri University of Massachusetts Lowell, Krishna Vellamchety Univeristy of Massachusetts Lowell, Justin Marwad University of Massachusetts Lowell, Maryam Abbasalizadeh University of Massachusetts Lowell, Claire Seungeun Lee University of Massachusetts Lowell, Sashank Narain University of Massachusetts Lowell
DOI