What is SPE4K?

Security & Privacy Education 4 Kids (SPE4K) is an ongoing collaboration between researchers at the University of Maryland’s College of Information (PIs: Jessica Vitak and Tammy Clegg) and the University of Chicago’s Computer Science Department (PI: Marshini Chetty). Since 2016, we’ve been talking to elementary school teachers, students, and parents about privacy and security education. While many adults think elementary school is too early to start talking about these topics, we believe that if you’re willing to give your child a tablet or smartphone, they’re old enough to start learning about these topics. 

Photo by Lucélia Ribeiro (Flickr)

Through two Google Grants, we developed a framework for helping to understand the challenges in this space. This framework, known as the Connecting Contexts framework, focuses on building and reinforcing learning opportunities at school and home and using examples that children are likely to experience in their everyday lives, such as using a diary to talk about privacy or a door lock to talk about security.

On this website, we share results from our research. Thanks to a 2020 grant from the National Science Foundation, we’ve been spending several years building and testing curriculum that can be easily integrated into existing lesson plans, and creating out-of-school materials that children can work on at home or could be integrated into after-school or library programs.