Shuffle, Cut, and Learn: Crypto Go, a Card Game for Teaching Cryptography

Ana I González-Tablas,Ignacio Cascos,María I González Vasco,Álvaro Planet Palomino

doi:10.3390/math8111993

Ana I González-Tablas, Ignacio Cascos + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/math8111993

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Abstract

Cryptography is the mathematical core of information security. It serves both as a source of hard computational problems and as precise language allowing for the formalization of sound security models. While dealing with the mathematical foundations of cybersecurity is only possible in specialized courses (tertiary level and beyond), it is essential to promote the role of mathematics in this field at early educational stages. With this in mind, we introduce Crypto Go, a physical card game that may be used both as a dissemination and as an educational tool. The game is carefully devised in order to entertain and stimulate players, while boosting their understanding on how basic cryptographic tools work and interplay. To get a preliminary assessment of our design, we collected data from a series of test workshops, which engaged over two hundred players from different ages and educational backgrounds. This basic evaluation indeed confirms that Crypto Go significantly improves students’ motivation and has a positive impact in their perception and understanding of the field.

Highlights

Cryptography is the basic science behind the design of secure computation and communication systems
We follow several authors in using a variable MEGAA to aggregate the scores of the three involved variables: motivation, user experience, and perceived learning
We have presented an educational card game, Crypto Go, and an initial evaluation of it

Summary

Introduction

Cryptography is the basic science behind the design of secure computation and communication systems. We pursued the design of a training tool suited for a wide audience, from the general public with hardly any prior knowledge to security professionals—who are not always schooled in up-to-date cryptographic developments. To this aim, we believe that the game is most useful if introduced in the context of a specially designed workshop, which may be adapted to the audience in order to: Mathematics 2020, 8, 1993; doi:10.3390/math8111993 www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematics (a) show the high-level mathematical ideas behind cryptographic tools and the use in daily life of these tools a.1

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