On August 14, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Academy, together with the Smart Internet Foundation (.ДЕТИ domain), held a Safe Internet Lesson as part of the Art Vacation project’s final session. The Russian State Children’s Library holds this summer educational campaign every summer by offering a host of creative activities. Participating in the final session were children aged 6-12 years.
The digital literacy workshop took the shape of a creative studio, since it was based on a comic book titled Loosing One’s Balance: How They Almost Got Me. In it, the main character, a teenager named Andrei, and Rubi, his assistant robot, come across various situations, some of them more dangerous than others, in the cyber space. Together, they come up with tricky solutions for overcoming these challenges, even if sometimes they get to suffer a bit. This comic book was written by the Study the Internet – Govern It! project team in cooperation with students from the Applied Digital Philology department at the People’s Friendship University with Andrei Sidenko, a specialist in children’s online safety from Kaspersky Lab, as its editor.
The participating youngsters had the time they needed to prepare for this lesson. When the session started, they all received the comic books with an assignment to read them at home together with their parents or older friends. Two days later, during the lesson, students worked with Viktoria Bunchuk, who is social projects manager at the Coordination Center and acted as a tutor in this project. Together, they discussed the situations described in the comic book, including various kinds of phishing attacks, including classic ones, via SMS, telephone calls and QR codes. The workshop also provided for consulting the Internet Dictionary which is available on the Study the Internet – Govern It! website, in order to understand complex notions like cyberchondria, patch, utility tool, social engineering, critical thinking, etc.
To better remember all these insights, children learned to identify fake news and fraudulent emails designed to mislead gullible users and understand when messages come from reliable sources. Students also tried to learn to respond to unexpected phone calls from unknown callers, and also searched the comic book for the so-called Easter eggs.
Children received stickers for giving correct answers or submitting smart ideas. This is how all the participants were ranked in terms of their contribution to the lesson. There were 10 activity books as prizes for them from the What Can I learn From… series.
By the end of the lesson, children came to the conclusion that despite all its inherent threats and dangers, the internet is a very useful tool. As long as you “read the user guide” and “master security protocols for operating this tool,” it offers a lot of potential and opportunities for personal development, education, communication, leisure and can even save people who find themselves in unfamiliar settings or locations.
Apart from the books and comic magazines, the participants received leaflets titled Critical Thinking and The Net Can Help, If You’re Lost, as well as useful souvenirs from the Study the Internet – Govern It! project, while the youngest students got coloring albums with Tocha, the .ДЕТИ mascot, and pencils from the Smart Internet Foundation.
