Project title: Innovative Approach to Kid's Cybersecurity Education: Empowering and Inspiring Educators for the Next Generation
Acronym: KidCy
Financial mechanism: Erasmus+ Programme by the European Commission
Project type: Cooperation partnerships in higher education
Project no: KA220-HED / 2024-1-LI01-KA220-HED-000246642
Project leader: dr. Irdin Pekaric (University of Liechtenstein)
VU implementers: assoc. prof. dr. Agnė Brilingaitė (head of VU part), prof. dr. Linas Bukauskas
Project duration: 01/09/2024 – 31/08/2026
Project partners: CyberSecurityHubcz (Čekija), Innsbruck University (Austria), University of Liechtenstein, University of Inland Norway, Vilnius University
Project goals:
The indirect goal of the project is to educate youngsters about cybersecurity, safeguarding them from various digital threats. It also seeks to encourage kids to consider cybersecurity as a future career. The project develops a modular course and tools to enhance school curricula, addressing the lack of standardized materials for educators. Thus, the main goal is to identify specific threats to children and provide educators with interactive materials to educate youngsters about these threats.
The project will develop a modular course with a toolset to enhance school curricula with standalone modules focused on cybersecurity education. It will conduct a thorough study to identify major security threats specific to children, align skills required to build resilience with the identified threats, develop materials for trainers at schools, evaluate the effectiveness of the developed course and modules, and disseminate the materials as Open Educational Resources (OER) for accessibility.
The project aims to achieve and provide multiple outcomes that relate to the aforementioned objectives. These include enhanced security awareness among children, increased interest in considering cybersecurity as a potential future career, development, and dissemination of standardized and easily adaptable materials for educators, promotion of soft skills through the developed course, internationalization of the materials, and ethical and responsible dissemination of materials.
Project card on the coordinator page.