Visual CryptoED: A Role-Playing and Visualization Tool for K-12 Cryptography Education

Role-playing and visual interfaces are vital in computer science education, notably cybersecurity, where a concrete understanding of defensive and offensive strategies matters. In this work, we implemented a cryptography education tool combining real-world scenarios, role-playing and visual interfaces to simplify cryptography education for K-12 students. This tool covers symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and secure hashing algorithms, which are fundamental to principles like confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. Our tool's core idea is to simulate a cryptographic transaction between a user and a bank while an attacker tries to compromise the communication. Within this role-playing and visual environment, students step into the roles of both the user and the bank, using an intuitive visual interface to perform essential cryptographic operations and grasp the underlying concepts. We evaluated our educational tool on 58 students (41 middle and 17 high school students), measuring comprehension via a survey. Our analysis revealed that middle and high school students could readily understand the key operations related to symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, and hashing using our role-playing tool. Nearly all participants expressed satisfaction with the tool and were willing to recommend it to others.