The Problem

While many teachers teach their students the simple concepts such as boundaries on what they can and cannot access on the internet. Very few teachers understand the concept of “Cyber Hygiene” but don’t know how to effectively educate their students on internet safety.

The problem we face is, while there is an increase in student usage of the internet in the school system, how will teachers effectively integrate internet safety through cyber hygiene concepts to students and help them long term? That's were we come in, We are attempting to teach children important cyber hygiene practices and concepts at a time where they will be most likely to learn and retain that knowledge.

Cyber hygiene is the key to internet safety and learning the importance of cyber hygiene. We believe that learning cyber hygiene at a young age, children will be able to retain and use the information now and later in life

We are attempting to teach elementary school students proper cyber hygiene practices and concepts at an age where they can learn and retain this information. In a world connected to each other, it is becoming more difficult to teach people how to stay safe on the Internet. Our product is attempting to teach children proper cyber hygiene etiquette so they may develop these practices at an informative age.

A lack of knowledge in cyber hygiene results in practices and habits such as weak passwords, unsafe sharing of personal information. Our hypothesis is teaching proper cyber hygiene practices at an early age will allow children to carry this information with them far easier in the future.

In an increasingly connected world, people are having greater difficulty learning how to protect themselves online. Though outside forces are the main threat, people need to learn how to properly protect themselves from those who would take advantage of their trust.

In order for this issue to be solved, we need to introduce the idea of learning cyber hygiene practices as a natural part of learning about the world. Doing so in a school setting, such as a school district, will allow not only children to learn these concepts, but also allow teachers to introduce these ideas more easily in a controlled setting.

In our research, we have found that there are not much in the way of school-sponsored programs teaching cyber hygiene practices to elementary school children, much less on a platform dedicated to fun games and activities.

The Design Thinking Process

When we created our prototype, we began by looking for a way we could introduce cyber-hygiene to students in college. This was due to our interviews with those who worked in IT at universities, all of which showed how little they knew about the term cyber-hygiene. As we worked towards developing an idea of what we wanted to create, we realized that helping college students wouldn't have as much of an impact as we hoped. Helping children develop good practices at an age where information will stick would be more beneficial, something we came to by completely pivoting on our original idea.

Our focus became how to teach elementary school children cyber-hygiene practices in a fun and interactive way. By learning these topics in a way that will be interesting for a child to learn, we hope that this information will be carried with them. In a growing world where everyone is connected to each other, we chose to focus on children who are growing up in this world to better prepare them against those who would attempt to harm them on the online world.

Building Empathy

For our product, we began by performing interviews on IT professionals to determine what they think when they think of cyber hygiene. Through our interviews, we learned that not many people knew or liked the term "cyber hygiene", equating it to cyber security. Through our discussions and research, we hypothesized that it would be easier to teach people of cyber hygiene as young as possible. And we realized that trying to teach cyber hygiene to adults and young adults would be difficult as they would either not understand or not embrace the lessons well enough. Realizing this, we set out to develop a product that can teach children cyber hygiene practices and concepts in a fun and interactive way.

We hope to work with the Virginia Board of Education as our clients, and the Virginia school districts as our first test subjects for our product. If successful, we intend to use one school district as a base for our results, pushing our product to multiple districts should the results be satisfactory to our clients. When interviewed by us during our preliminary phase, the term cyber hygiene was not well-known or well-regarded. Our interviewees were more familiar with the term cybersecurity rather than cyber-hygiene. We are hoping that with this product, we can introduce the concept of cyber-hygiene to younger computer users which will become more widespread with time.

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