Designing a Visual Cryptography Curriculum for K-12 Education

Abstract

We have designed and developed a simple, visual, and narrative K-12 cybersecurity curriculum leveraging the Scratch programming platform to demonstrate and teach fundamental cybersecurity concepts such as confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. The visual curriculum simulates a real-world scenario of a user and a bank performing a bank transaction and an adversary attempting to attack the transaction.We have designed six visual scenarios, the curriculum first introduces students to three visual scenarios demonstrating attacks that exist when systems do not integrate concepts such as confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. Then, it introduces them to three visual scenarios that build on the attacks to demonstrate and teach how these fundamental concepts can be used to defend against them. We conducted an evaluation of our curriculum through a study with 18 middle and high school students. To evaluate the student's comprehension of these concepts we distributed a technical survey, where overall average of students answering these questions related to the demonstrated concepts is 9.28 out of 10. Furthermore, the survey results revealed that 66.7% found the system extremely easy and the remaining 27.8% found it easy to use and understand.