Towards A Novel Visual Privacy Themed Educational Tool for Cybersecurity Awareness and K-12 Outreach

With the growing nationwide demand for cybersecurity workforce, the academia in information technology (IT) computing disciplines needs to step up initiatives towards preparing our youth in cybersecurity. A lack of awareness about societal and human security elements, including privacy, as well as a limited understanding of information assurance plus usable security may expose our young generation to privacy invasion, data hacks and cyber-attacks. The current IT2017 curricular recommendations and the latest CSEC2017 cybersecurity curriculum guidelines clearly point to a need for inclusion of societal and human security domain topics within the present IT computing knowledge areas - especially the ones that are connected to social dimensions. With the frequently occurring cyber-attacks around us, our youth needs basic awareness of privacy notions and knowledge of usable information security, particularly at the K-12 level. Existing literature show that there have been multiple instances of pre-university IT computing educational research work that focus on 'data privacy' along with cyber-security awareness. However, to our knowledge, there has been no significant pre-university research and development efforts on a 'visual privacy' theme, which involves social media and anonymity topics for teaching media privacy along with basic information assurance concepts. This poster will present our new initiative towards building an effective yet simple visually interactive educational tool, which is based upon the theme of visual privacy i.e. privacy through visual anonymity (PVA). This tool introduces fundamental concepts of media privacy, teaches information assurance topics (like applied cryptography, reverse engineering) and engages discussions on privacy versus security trade-offs in public surveillance space. This work will describe our novel software app based nifty lesson plan, which is intended to address the knowledge gap in this 'visual privacy and security' themed experiential learning at the K-12 level. Our visual privacy themed educational tool uses the platform of privacy-enhanced computer vision. It illustrates relevant IT computing related cybersecurity topics, including privacy, ethics, privacy versus security, applied cryptography and reverse engineering. We look forward to receiving feedback and inputs from the SIGITE community about the initial prototype of our unique educational tool. We also plan to share our experiences of successfully using this work-in-progress tool in hosting several hands-on workshop sessions for middle-school students, as part of our Google IgniteCS outreach program. Additionally, this work will present the survey data, which we collected from our middle-school workshop participants. These preliminary survey responses have been gathered in an effort to evaluate our novel tool-driven PVA experiential learning model. We envision our creative visual privacy themed educational tool as a potential cybersecurity learning medium as well as a prospective cyber-outreach interface for engaging and recruiting pre-university students, leading to IT computing careers.