A Middle-School Case Study: Piloting A Novel Visual Privacy Themed Module for Teaching Societal and Human Security Topics Using Social Media Apps

This Full paper in the Innovative Practice Category introduces an innovative visual privacy themed pre-university educational module using social media apps for creating privacy awareness as well as teaching societal and human security topics. With the advent of internet (World Wide Web) and social media, and the extensive use of these resources by naïve young users, privacy issues pop up every now and then. The lack of privacy and security awareness may lead to confidential information leaks during the use of online contents, particularly social media. The current IEEE/ACM curricular guidelines in CS, IT and cybersecurity clearly point to a need for inclusion of societal and human security topics at the college level, so that a general awareness can be created regarding today's growing privacy concerns, including privacy issues with media sharing. However, there is still a gap within the K-12 curriculum in regard to these security and privacy topics. Even though there has been some computing educational research work on the topic of data privacy at the K-12 level, the visual privacy theme under the societal and human security domain has hardly been explored within K-12. None of the K-12 cybersecurity educational modules have employed the privacy-enhanced computer vision theme along with a social media platform. This paper intends to address the this gap by presenting a visual privacy themed lesson plan using social media apps for teaching privacy, ethics and machine learning. Its main contribution is a unique visual privacy education based hands-on outreach module that utilizes the PVA (Privacy through Visual Anonymity) notion to teach privacy, ethics and machine learning using media images and videos. Our module uses two freely accessible apps, namely an Obscura Cam and YouTube - Face Blur. These apps are utilized to illustrate the concept of visual privacy and demonstrate PVA in pictures and media clips. Additionally, this paper describes our research case study conducted by piloting our PVA workshop module at the middle-school level. This paper discusses and analyzes the learner data obtained from the workshop participants as part of our Google IgniteCS outreach project. The learning analytics survey data collected during our PVA workshop sessions with various middle-school participants indicate that the described visual privacy module can become a simple yet effective tool for privacy literacy, as it can help build privacy perceptions in young minds. Our acquired results also suggest that that this PVA themed outreach lesson plan can be used as a potential medium for recruiting K-12 students into computing and cybersecurity disciplines.