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.