Families and ICT

This week holds two important days – ‘International Day of Families’ on Friday 15th May and ‘Information Society Day’ on Sunday 17th May. To recognise these, we have made one of our apps (usually £1.49) free for 7 days – as it combines aspects of both.

The app is aimed at 8-11 year olds. It's all about a family who love technology – and use it for various reasons – but keep forgetting their passwords. It’s a very relevant problem, and one I think we can all relate to. The family – Bob, Barbara, Ben and Bella – come up with a way to create unique, safe and easy-to-remember passwords.

In order to do this, they think of building a simple algorithm, hence the name ‘Bob’s Algorithm’. So, through Bob and his family discussing how the algorithm works, students learn what an algorithm is by the use of variables and some simple logic. As well as this, students’ attention is also brought to digital literacy – keeping personal information private.

If you haven’t used Digital Mysteries before, then as a quick summary, it is a way of learning through collaboration. The unique technology we use allows two students to work on it at the same time, on one iPad. Throughout solving the task, the pair must discuss what they’re reading, think of names for groups (to organise their ideas) and negotiate an answer to “Can you write the algorithm in one line and show what the password would be for a different person and website?”

• The app - click here or search 'algorithm mystery' on the App Store
• Free trial of Windows PC/laptop version - click here
• Email info@reflectivethinking.com for a free PDF version to print out

More information on the awareness days

International Day of Families #DayofFamilies

This day, “proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1993, provides an opportunity to promote awareness of issues relating to families and to increase knowledge of the social, economic and demographic processes affecting families.” It has inspired awareness raising across the world and in many areas provides opportunity to highlight different areas of importance or interest.

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day #WTISD

While this day is commemortated every year, 2015 marks an important anniversary – 150 years since the International Telegraph Convention, ‘an intergovernmental treaty that established the basic principles for international telegraphy’. From these origins on which WTISD is based, the day’s purpose is to help raise awareness of the possibilities the use of the internet and ICT can bring to society.

What’s the password?!

It can be tricky thinking of engaging ways to help explain some topics on the new computing curriculum. One idea is to find a 'real life' problem and reflect it in that; so when it came to designing a task for the topic of ‘using logic reasoning to explain algorithms’, I was debating what would be best to use.

Click here to try our app (£1.49): Bob's Algorithm

It was during this ‘thinking period’ that I tried to enter my kitchen at home, to be met with "what's the password?" My seven year old daughter does this quite often: she loves the idea of passwords. Soon after, I was allowed in when I guessed one of the usuals (the word 'purple') and I thought of the idea for our new task.

With so many login details that we as adults even struggle to remember, creating strong yet memorable passwords is important for us as well. Bob and his family were created - a family of four who struggle to remember passwords, so Bob, the father, creates an easy-to-use algorithm for his family which they can all use, yet it produces different passwords depending on what's in each 'variable'. 

It’s a ‘current’ topic and a problem of many, but also a simple and effective way of explaining how an algorithm works. It also made for a mystery which adds to the digital literacy section of the curriculum – keeping personal information private!

I personally use an algorithm for creating passwords, and it's worked great for me so far, so what's good for me is good for Bob! The main thing is it creates a memorable and strong password for any website based on a combination of input variables and some rules. These are simple inputs such as their names, a secret number and a website name. It will help with explaining a number of concepts in one go.

One of the slips

By introducing all this through a story about a person coming up with a way to help his wife and kids generate and remember passwords, it is possible to include all these ideas into a nice story thread that will not intimidate KS2 students. This can also be used to explain how the same algorithm generates different outputs based on different initialization values and input variables. It can also challenge students to come up with their own password generation algorithms.

Students need to understand that algorithms are not limited to computer programs and this task provides a good example of one that they can use any time – such as to stop unauthorized people going into kitchens.

You can find out more about this mystery by clicking here. To try it (£1.49), search 'Digital Mysteries Algorithm' on the App Store or click here. To download a trial of the Windows PC/laptop software click here.

What is the world's weakest password?

In an article today on The Guardian's website, they've shared security firm SplashData's findings on the worst passwords used.

Password '123456' has been named as the worst one for 2014, and is joined in the top 10 by various other number-only passwords.

While SplashData do make password management software, they claim its "worst passwords" are based on a list of 3.3m leaked passwords last year specific to North America and western Europe.

The company do argue that evidence shows that people are still using favourite sports teams, birth years and their children's names as passwords. The article explains that this information could be found out relatively easily by cybercriminals and weak passwords are a particular security mishap when we use the same ones for multiple services.

Click here to read the full article.

With the goal of providing interesting, relevant and useful tasks for the new computing curriculum, we created a mystery called Bob's Algorithm. While the task helps students learn about how an algorithm works, they are also helped to create unique, safe and memorable passwords for all of their favourite websites. It's a concept that can be tweaked in lots of different ways to make it as secure as possible.

If you'd like to try this task free on Windows, please contact info@reflectivethinking.com with your name, role, school name and the number of computers you'd like to try it on.

To try on the iPad, click here.

Thanks,

Natalie Taylor