Title
A Social Network Simulation Game to Raise Awareness of Privacy among School Children
Abstract
In this paper, we address the problem of enhancing young people's awareness of the mechanisms involving privacy in online social networks by presenting an innovative approach based on gamification. In particular, we propose a web application that allows kids and teenagers to experience the typical dynamics of information spread through a realistic interactive simulation. Under the supervision of the teacher, the students are inserted in a small artificial social graph, and through the different stages of game, they can post sentences with different levels of sensitivity, and “like” or share messages published by friends. At the end of game session, the application calculate multiple behavioral scores that can be used by the teacher to raise the curiosity of the students and stimulate discussions. Moreover, a complete interactive report is generated to analyze every individual action of the terminated game sessions. Our educational tool has been employed within an extensive experimental study involving more than 450 kids and 22 teachers in seven Italian primary school institutes. The results show that our approach is stimulating and supports teachers in helping kids discover and recognize potential privacy risks in social network activities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TLT.2018.2881193
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
Keywords
Field
DocType
Games,Privacy,Facebook,Tools,Data protection
Internet privacy,Social graph,Curiosity,Social media,Social network,Computer science,Interactive simulation,Web application,Multimedia,Digital literacy
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
4
1939-1382
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Livio Bioglio1277.56
Sara Capecchi214412.52
Federico Peiretti310.36
Dennis Sayed410.36
Antonella Torasso510.36
Ruggero G. Pensa635431.20