Italiano (Italia)
Cybersecurity for children is attracting rapidly increasing attention due to near-pervasive access to the internet, coupled with children’s constant exposure to various online risks. These days kids start going online at an early age, even more so after the sudden boom in remote schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So it’s crucial to provide school teachers with proper training in cybersecurity so they can transfer appropriate knowledge and skills to young learners.
The SuperCyberKids project, co-funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme, aims to respond to this pressing need. Its core mission is to create an educational ecosystem on cybersecurity suitable for children aged 8 to 13, and for their teachers. This will contain learning content on cybersecurity provided via a game-based approach so as to strengthen motivation and engagement. The content will be delivered through a gameful learning platform that includes two digital games on cybersecurity. Together with the educational ecosystem itself, SuperCyberKids will develop and issue extensive guidelines for integration, and these two elements will form the backbone of the project’s expected outcomes. The project team will then pilot these two outputs in four different settings: Europe-wide in English and - in localised form - in Italy, Estonia, and Germany. This testing will lead to development of a comprehensive SuperCyberKids handbook of good practices on cybersecurity education in schools for children aged 8-13. The handbook will be broad in scope, including recommendations for a broad set of interested stakeholders: researchers, school heads and teachers, parents, game and instructional designers, as well as policy makers, regulatory bodies, and institutions in cybersecurity education.
SuperCyberKids brings together eight partners from five countries, including two key European-level umbrella organisations, one dealing specifically with cybersecurity (the European Cyber Security Organisation - ECSO) and the other with education (the European School Heads Association - ESHA). Each has a strong membership base right across Europe, so SuperCyberKids can count on broad stakeholder representation and involvement in project activities. Amongst others, these activities will comprise panel groups and small-scale enactment events, together with pilot use cases directly involving at least fifty school heads and over a hundred teachers.