A Novel Visual-Privacy Themed Experiential- Learning Tool for Human-Privacy & Societal-Security Awareness in Middle-School and High-School Youth

This Full-paper in the Innovative-Practice Category introduces an innovative visual-privacy themed experiential-learning tool, and discusses how it is used for building human-privacy plus societal-security awareness in middle-school and high-school youth. The new GDPR driven business-communications are touching the lives of worldwide-consumers, including youth, who use technology-services, like internet and email, from an early age. A lack of privacy-security awareness in this context may expose youth. The new CSTA-standards advocate for inclusion of privacy, safety, ethics, societal-security and human-privacy topics in K-12. Existing literature show multiple instances of K-12 research-studies on data-privacy education and cybersecurity awareness. However, very few of these explore the visual-privacy theme in a way that middle-school and high-school youth can learn privacy, security and ethics through the lens of privacy-enhancing video-surveillance. This paper presents our simple but novel, visually interactive experiential-learning tool, which is based upon the PVA theme as applicable to visual-media contents. Our unique tool introduces young learners to privacy-security concepts, illustrates applied-cryptography and discusses privacy-security tradeoffs in surveillance-space. The educational application of this tool addresses the gap within the current K-12 educational-research work in societal-security implications and human-privacy domain. We discuss our experimental-studies with this tool, including piloting the tool-based hands-on workshop sessions with middle-school and high-school learners, as part of GICS and NSA-GenCyber projects. Additionally, we share and analyze the learning-assessment data and survey-responses collected from participants, in an effort to evaluate the prospects of our experiential-learning model as a potential educational and outreach medium for engaging and recruiting K-12 students in computing-disciplines.