4 Edutaining Methods To Teach Children About Passwords

Passwords are the bread and butter of online safety. In a world that’s becoming increasingly reliant on digital technology and systems, it’s important that young people understand the power of a strong password in keeping their data safe.

But how can we effectively teach children, not only why password security is important but how to create strong credentials? Here are five educational yet entertaining methods to implement in the classroom or at home:

Challenge Their Creativity

 A great way to teach children about passwords is to have them make their own creative combinations of words and phrases.

Use a mix of colours and objects around the room as a guide to help children come up with secure examples.

It’s important to note here that passwords must also be memorable, so a good tip would be to use their favourite colour and objects they see every day and are therefore more likely to remember.

This task demonstrates to children how easy it is to create fresh passwords for everything they use whilst encouraging them to get creative. You can then turn it into a competition – who can come up with the wackiest combination?!

Create a Secret Word Game

This fun game involves nothing more than some paper and a pen. Start by pairing children together and ask one of them to write a “secret word” using a combination of 8 letters and numbers.

Their partner must guess the word within 5 tries, and much like Hangman, they can guess individual characters too. This mini-game is designed to show children how effective a strong and varied password can be.

Playing at home? This is a great game for the whole household to join in on!

Use Real-Life Examples

Sometimes the best way to teach children about passwords is to simply show them! Start by demonstrating how to set up a password on a home or school device, making sure they understand the process.

Explain to them that using capital letters, numbers and symbols make passwords much stronger and harder to break into.

Finally, go through the process again but this time, the child must create their own password whilst repeating the process back to you.

Ground the Concept in Realism

The use of role-play or visual demonstration is an effective way to communicate the importance of passwords to children. You could show them that longer passwords are more effective by using objects to represent hackers, as well the characters in a password.

For example, use a ruler to represent a long password and a rubber to represent a short password. The hacker can be something small like a piece of blue tack.

Then turn it into a competition! Ask one child to roll the blue tack around the rubber and another to roll it around the ruler. They will find that it takes less time to roll it around the longer object than the shorter object.

This will show them that longer passwords are harder to penetrate!

Password safety sounds like a boring topic but, when presented in the right way, it can be a great source of fun! Do you have any fun methods to teach children how to create strong passwords? Let us know in the comments!