NSF Awards: 1849768
Cryptology, the art of making and breaking codes, and cybersecurity are STEM fields paramount to national security. The practices used in these fields, like encryption and decryption, parallel skills children develop while learning to read and write. However, cryptology and cybersecurity practices, knowledge, and skills are rarely built into a traditional school curriculum.
Our interdisciplinary team of STEM education researchers, special educators, computer scientists, cybersecurity specialists, educational technologists, and K-12 after-school leaders and practitioners is designing and implementing a technology-enhanced curriculum built on the practices of cryptology and cybersecurity. The curriculum, titled CryptoComics, combines comic book, digital, and un-plugged activities to engage upper-elementary (grades 3-5) students, primarily girls and minority students, in after-school environments. The activities in the CryptoComics curriculum uses cryptology and cybersecurity practices to help learners develop their computational thinking, self-efficacy, morphological awareness, and interest and identity in STEM fields and careers.
We are currently conducting our second pilot of the CryptoComics curriculum and are targeting after-school programs that serve primarily African American girls. This video addresses the culturally responsive design and implementation of the curriculum. We also describe the emotional, vocational, and cognitive assessments we are using to measure the impact of the curriculum. We are also looking at the impacts of the curriculum relative to the individual differences in visuospatial reasoning.
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Thank you for visiting our CryptoComics – Cryptology and Cybersecurity for Kids video! CryptoComics is a cryptology (the science of secret communication) and cybersecurity, NSF funded afterschool curriculum designed for 3rd – 5th graders. We look forward to discussing our project with you, and we want to specifically invite teachers to share their experiences and thoughts.
Our video gives a brief overview of the project, but there is certainly much more for us to discuss like the iterative design process we are using to develop curriculum materials, developing and maintaining afterschool partnerships, our reasons for and interests in collecting individual differences data, and the changes we made to accommodate COVID procedures.
Any comments and questions are welcomed! Please view our video, and if you think it’s deserving, please give us a thumbs up for public choice. We look forward to discussing our project with you!
April Bartnick
Zhen Xu
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
I really enjoyed your video and project. What were the most profound lessons you learned through your work?
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi DeLene - Thank you for your question! We discussed your question today at our weekly meeting, and these were some of the lessons our team reflected on:
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Thank you for your wonderful response. I can see many highlights.
Susan Mecholsky
Loved this. Good work ! No critic just keep it up!
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Julie Brown
Very exciting project! Thanks for sharing your work.
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Troy Sadler
I really like the puzzle solving dimensions of learning opportunities. Are there opportunities to connect this after school experience with in-school curriculum?
Zhen Xu
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hello Troy - Thanks for your comment! We wrote this grant specifically for afterschool because, while we think this content is incredibly important, we know it would be challenging for teachers to fit this curriculum in with all their other curricular demands. That being said, we aligned the content with NGSS and CCSS, so the content is connected to in-school standards. Teachers could pull unplugged activities to use them on their own, and can adjust materials or activities to fit the needs of their classroom.
Zhen Xu
Kara Dawson
Professor
Troy -Christine is right but there are certain components of the curriculum that could be integrated into an in-school curriculum. For example, our digital Caesar Wheel could be used during a math lesson and many of the puzzles and codes are related to WWII history and would fit nicely into social studies lessons. We also have an invisible ink activity that could fit into science lessons. But, this integration is not the intent of the project.
Marcello Rossi
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Educators: Does anyone else teach cryptology and cybersecurity ? In this day and age, I would think it would be essential for students to have a working knowledge to protect themselves. It is also such a huge part of most careers as well. It's the future which should be taught now. What are your thoughts, teachers? Viewers?
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Josie Melton
Post-Doctoral Researcher and Senior Instructor
I imagine that these materials will be very useful for teachers planning to address CS standards. Will there be PD opportunities available for interested teachers to support the Fall 2021 implementation?
Christine Wusylko
Myriam Steinback
Zhen Xu
Zhen Xu
Research Assistant
Hi Josie, thank you for your question. Professional development is a critical part of our project, and we do want to support more teachers to build their knowledge, skills, teaching strategies, etc. to implement this curriculum, potentially help them with their future teaching, and make a wider impact to reach more students. For fall implementation, we are going to hold a 3-day PD on zoom for teachers who will participate in fall implementation. We are going to make our curriculum publicly available after the fall implementation. At that time, we expect to have more support materials accessible to teachers.
Myriam Steinback
Josie Melton
Post-Doctoral Researcher and Senior Instructor
Thanks for your response - What are the goals of the 3-day PD? I am wondering specifically what support you think teachers need in order to successfully implement the curriculum.
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi Josie - We've learned a lot from the teachers in our two pilot implementations. Namely, we learned that:
Myriam Steinback
Independent Consultant
Exciting project. I'll be curious to learn more about the PD you plan to offer teachers before this coming Fall's implementation.
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Maya Israel
What a wonderful project. I love the fact that you're combining tablet activities with unplugged activities, which is so powerful for this age group. You mentioned your focus on creating teacher materials for this after school program. As you move towards scaling nationally next year, how are you going to address teacher professional development and teacher support for use of these materials? Also, given your focus on culturally responsive pedagogy, will this also be baked into your PD?
Lynda Gayden
Christine Wusylko
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi Maya - Thank you so much for your question! We are hosting a 3-day PD in July for teachers who will be implementing nationally. We are just beginning to plan the details of the event and are actively thinking through the issues you raised. We also know our teachers will probably require a lot of support - with the content, technology, and as you noted, pedagogy. One of our big goals for the 3-days and beyond is to develop small communities, or hubs, of teachers. These communities will be grouped by location, and one member of our team will be the designated point person to communicate with and provide support to these teachers. Additionally, we will design small group activities during the PD where the teachers in each community will to get to know one another. After the PD, we will encourage these communities to stay connected and rely on one another for local support as we continue to support from afar.
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Bravo to all for this wonderful discussion! Thank you for viewing and adding your questions and expertise. Please share the STEM Showcase with others so they can participate in the discussion too. Let's get more educators involved in viewing these top projects. Voting and discussion ends on May 18th at 8PM EDT. (but viewing is open anytime) https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/
For presenters, what are your next steps going forward?
Christine Wusylko
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Thank you so much for facilitating DeLene! We have had so much fun as a team reflecting on these questions!
Our biggest challenge right now is preparing for national implementation during Fall 2021. We are currently assembling our team of teachers and developing the 3-day professional development that will orient them to the curriculum, content, technology, pedagogy, and our community. After national implementation, we will make our curriculum publicly available.
Myriam Steinback
Independent Consultant
Christine, very exciting project. The PD that you describe sounds very ambitious for 3 days. Have you considered having it be longer or having a follow-up?
Christine Wusylko
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi Myriam - thanks for watching our video! Yes, we have a lot planned for the 3-day PD! We considered making it longer, but we wanted to respect our teacher's time, and 3 full days of Zoom activities is already a lot. We will provide follow-up support though continued outreach and by nurturing and encouraging local community support. After the PD, one of our team members will be assigned a community of teachers and will provide support via weekly checkins, emails and phone calls. These communities will be grouped by location, and will have time to form connections and relationships during PD. In addition to our support, we will encourage these teachers to support one another locally during the Fall.
Katie O'Hara
This is such an exciting project! It's unique to see a complex but highly-desired subject like cyber security broken down and taught to young learners. I've read that students often decide which career path they'll pursue by the time the leave middle school, so the earlier the introduction, the better! I especially love the comic book aspect of the program - what an awesome way to get kids excited about this topic. Way to go!
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Pasha Antonenko
Associate Professor
Thank you for this feedback, Katie! We are also super excited about the potential of this work to get children more informed and excited about cybersecurity and cryptology. As Alan Turing once said, “Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game." And yes, Dr. Turing is one of our comic book characters.
Marcello Rossi
Marcello Rossi
I agree this is powerful and a necessary response to start our children early on these sciences and technologies. This is a fantastic stem program. Thank you
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Beth Daniels
Wow! Secret codes? Yes! I would have loved this as a child!! I am captivated by the way you take a fascinating topic and approach it from so many different perspectives and modalities. How are educators responding to your content? What about the kids themselves? What pulls them in, gets them engaged? Are you looking at how this learning transfers to other domains?
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Research Assistant
Hi Beth, thank you for your questions. Generally, teachers have provided us very positive feedback, but we also learned a lot from their implementation and adjusted our curriculum based on that. From our observation, students were very engaged in solving the puzzles, figuring out the mysteries, and encoding/decoding secret messages. Students reported to us he learned something he didn't know was real. However, we are not able to examine the transfer from learning this curriculum to learning achievement in schools.
Janice Walker
Great project and so good to see the needed PD for teachers. NCyTE (National Cybersecurity Training & Education Center) will be interested to follow the outcomes of your national efforts and possibly partner on dissemination to educators.
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Pasha Antonenko
Associate Professor
Thank you for this feedback, Janice. We'd love to connect regarding a possible partnership. We will be in touch as we have a better sense of our outcomes this Fall, when we implement the curriculum nationally. It would be wonderful to collaborate with NCyTE, there is a lot of synergies between our projects.
Daniel Serrano
Loved learning about this project, especially as I'm starting to use the comic medium in my own programs and teaching.
I'd love to learn more about what led you to use comics in your third flank of the curriculum and what resources (human and otherwise) you used to develop the comic materials.
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Research Assistant
Hi Daniel, we chose to use comics for two major reasons. First, we found upper elementary students are obsessed with cartoons and comics, like Naruto, Pokémon, etc. Second, we want to integrate the content knowledge in a meaningful way, rather than teaching them as isolated activities. The comic book story travels across times and places to introduce the historical background and key concepts. The characters use knowledge in cryptology and cybersecurity to solve their problems, which is what we want to convey to students - what you are learning is meaningful and important to solve real-life problems. We also found the students related themselves to the comic book characters with increased motivation and engagement. We designed and wrote the comic book story as a team, and we invited a local artist/movie producer/graphic designer to develop the story into the comic book.
Daniel Serrano
Thanks for that info, Zhen!
Zhen Xu
Lauren Goff
I love that you included comic books/graphic novels! I think this is a great way to engage additional students who may relate to these types of books. What responses have you had from the kids from sharing these stories?
Christine Wusylko
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi Lauren - Thank you for your comment! We've seen kids connect with the comic book characters by commenting on things they do, like "of course Carly would do that!" or brining up jokes the girls will say later in class, like calling the Chihuahuan desert the "puppy desert". We also got some feedback from kids saying they liked how the activities are connected to the comic book story.
Bridget Dalton Dalton
A wonderful project, and so timely! I'm curious about how you're assessing your cognitive and emotional outcomes? In our Imagine AI project we are exploring AI and ethics, using stories as the launching point for each module. I wish you a very successful launch of your fall 21 study and look forward to learning more!
Christine Wusylko
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Thank you for your comment Bridget! We were just discussing how awesome your project is in our team meeting! We are assessing cognitive outcomes by using pre/post assessments on cryptology and cybersecurity items, through classroom observations of class activities, and app analytics. We are assessing emotional outcomes through classroom observations and also though individual feedback and group interviews with students.
Bridget Dalton Dalton
Thanks for this information, Christine. I appreciate how you are drawing on multiple data sources to assess emotional outcomes, as well as developing a pre-post assessment of the cognitive outcomes. We're in the midst of analyzing chat transcripts from our 9th grade study, and affect is certainly emerging in multiple ways within the community. I look forward to our teams getting together via zoom sometime this summer!
Christine Wusylko
Susan Warshaw
Excellent presentation. Great potential for nation-wide implementation and widespread impact on cybersecurity awareness for next generation of citizens.. .
Christine Wusylko
Zhen Xu
Michael Berson
What a wonderful project focus. How can we get information on your national implementation?
Christine Wusylko
Pasha Antonenko
Associate Professor
Hi Michael, thank you for your feedback! We have been piloting CryptoComics in FL and this year we started working with a national sample of afterschool educators (outside of the state of FL). We'd love to discuss this with you if you are interested. Let us know if you'd like to connect via Zoom or phone.
Michael Berson
Pasha, it would be great to connect!
Bruce Bukiet
This is such a great project. Seems like you really are covering all the bases and it is extremely well thought out and presented. I hope we can use or adapt your materials/lessons for our STEM for Success (STEM in Your Home) project which focuses on STEM especially for elementary school girls. Where can we find your materials?
Christine Wusylko
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi Bruce - thank you for your comment! Our curriculum is still being tested and modified, but our website with all materials will be available to the public after national implementation. We will reach out when our materials are publicly available!
Mark Heckman
Interesting. Does this curriculum have a critical thinking/analysis component for security threats. Now that we see how finding "secret" information leads to validation of false information - different world even the common folks live in. But I am sure you are on this. And of course Crypto Comics is used mainly by the bitcoin or now NFT world. Reminds us that now in academia we oddly have to trademark cool ideas or terms. Universities are starting to get this. But these are of course minor comments. Great project, look forward to seeing it nation wide.
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Hi Mark - thanks for your comment! We do have a critical thinking/analysis component for security threats. We tackle things that 3-5th graders may experience, like phishing, password management, and protecting/disclosing private and personal information. You bring up an interesting point about the term Crypto! We chose it because our curriculum is, in part, about cryptology. Additionally, crypto is a prefix that means "hidden", which we introduce during our chapter on morphological awareness.
Pendred Noyce
Hi Christine, I found this project particularly interesting because Tumblehome Books has also been involved in trying to develop ideas around both codes and ciphers and cybersecurity, through two middle grade novels--The Harrowing Case of the Hackensack Hacker and The Cryptic Case of the Coded Fair--aimed at grades 4-8. Instead of a comic, we use science adventure books with manga-style illustrations and a similar exploration through space and time. We have made early attempts at designing on and offline activities. It would be great to have a conversation with you about what you are learning.
Zhen Xu
Research Assistant
Hi Pendred, I am excited to see your comment. I believe the PI of our project was inspired by a children's book his kids were reading and generated the idea of CryptoComics. As we started to design the curriculum, we read a lot of children's books (both storybooks and activity books). We also wrote a brochure Junior Cryptologist Manual as part of learning materials to support the learning of content knowledge for both students and teachers.
The students and teachers in the pilot study loved the comic book, which weaves all the activities together to make sense of the curriculum and connect the curriculum with real-life experiences and cybersecurity challenges. The power of storytelling is unfolded in this curriculum. But we also found some struggling readers had problems reading the comic book, So right now, we are adding audio to the comic book in the tablet/web-based app. And the new app will be put into use in the fall implementation.
We'd like to connect with you regarding this. Let us know if you'd like to connect via Zoom or phone.
Satabdi Basu
Hello,
This is such a cool, fun and important project. Congratulations team! I'm curious if you've thought about connecting cybersecurity concepts to computational thinking and/or programming (pattern recognition, loops, conditionals, etc.). Cybersecurity concepts sound like a great context for making this connection. Thanks!
Christine Wusylko
Research Fellow
Thank you for watching our video Satabdi! We also agree that there are exciting connections between cybersecurity and computational thinking! While we don't explicitly teach programming, aspects of computational thinking are embedded into the curriculum. We explore pattern recognition when we introduce frequency analysis, and kids use loops when doing brute force to crack a code by hand and by machine. We also touch on concepts like social engineering and hacking for "good". Additionally, several of the STEM jobs we highlight are programming jobs, and one of our STEM role models is a security engineer at Google Project Zero.
Satabdi Basu
Stacey Forsyth
Great video! I'm excited to see that you're creating cybersecurity resources for younger students and would love to learn more when your resources become available!
Christine Wusylko