Teach teens computing: Encryption and cryptography

Course description

This course explores encryption and cryptography. You'll learn about what encryption is and how it was used in the past, and use the Caesar and Vigenère ciphers. You'll also look at modern encryption, and investigate both symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes. The course also takes a look at the future of encryption, and includes several practical encryption activities that are also appropriate to use in the classroom.

This course is designed for educators delivering lessons to learners aged 14 – 16 years old, and for anyone interested in learning about how encryption is used to communicate securely.

Required knowledge or skills

This course is designed to be easy to access to anyone with a basic level of computing knowledge. However, there are some concepts discussed in this course but not explored in depth, and it may be helpful to have some prior knowledge of those. To help you succeed, you may want to check your understanding of the following topics:

• A basic understanding of binary is helpful, but not necessary

• An understanding of how data is represented in computer systems is also helpful

What you will learn

After completing these 2 modules, you will be able to:

• Describe the general process of encryption and decryption

• Apply a Caesar cipher and a Vigenère cipher

• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different encryption algorithms

• Compare symmetric and asymmetric encryption

• Demonstrate methods of breaking simple encryption schemes

• Describe how encryption is used in the modern world, and some of the possible ethical implications of this