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:

• The need – There is a desperate need to teach this content, but a very real lack of knowledge and curriculum materials, especially for young kids.
• Diversity of programs - We knew that implementation would vary from program to program, but we were surprised by how different implementation would look at each program. Even the same teacher implementing at two different programs would have vastly different outcomes. Additionally, COVID has provided an additional challenge in recruiting long-term partners in afterschool program, which traditionally have a higher turnover than in-school staff.
• Designing for all - Our program aims at designing a culturally responsive and inclusive curriculum. We are keeping our goal in mind during the two rounds of pilot studies by constantly adjusting and updating the curriculum to meet the needs of different students. We are also actively helping teachers adjust the curriculum based on their student’s needs. This is a goal we are always adjusting for and working on.
• Working on an interdisciplinary team – To develop a cryptology and cybersecurity curriculum for young kids, we worked with a large team who have a wide variety of expertise. The success of our curriculum is dependent on who we have on the team, and the willingness of the members to work together on a large project.

Thank you for your wonderful response.  I can see many highlights. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Hi Josie - We've learned a lot from the teachers in our two pilot implementations. Namely, we learned that:

• Teachers need content support. This is content they are most likely unfamiliar with, and will need a little extra background information and support to teach these lessons. They also need "crutches" they can fall back on if they forget some of the content. (For example, we wrote discussion questions teachers can use). Knowing the content generally, and knowing how to use the teacher guides for extra support when they need it, is key to a successful implementation.
• Teachers need a sense of the big picture. The big picture is important so teachers can help students connect to the curriculum, and see why it relevant to their own life. Without the big picture, kids and teachers could just go through the motions of the activities without understanding how it relates to them, or why they are doing the activity.
• Teachers need to know the key concepts for each chapter. Our curriculum, like most, starts with easier concepts and builds to more challenging concepts. Teachers need a sense of what are the key concepts they need to touch on so kids can have a solid foundation to build on. Additionally, we have a lot going on each chapter, with comic book, unplugged, and digital activities. Teachers need a sense of what activities students will do, why, and when.
• We also anticipate that teachers will need ongoing, community support. The content and curriculum is impossible to learn completely in 3-days. We are building in time for teachers to get to know one another, and develop connections with programs located close to one another 

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. 

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. 

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?

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Thanks for that info, Zhen!

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. 

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.

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!

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.

Pasha, it would be great to connect! 

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! 

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. 

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.

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.