Student-Generated Videos for Promoting Better Attitudes towards Cryptography

We present an active learning experience conducted on a Cryptography course within a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering with the goal of promoting better attitudes towards cryptography. Students were asked to create short videos that presented in an attractive way day-to-day topics or systems related with cryptography but not included in the course syllabus. Participation was optional although additional marks were assigned depending on a rubric-based assessment. Students, besides creating the videos, could participate also (or only) in evaluating some of the peer-created videos using the same rubric used by the teachers. Other active learning experiences consider student-generated videos but often topics are required to be within the course syllabus. We describe the experience design and how we have used YouTube and Microsoft Class Notebook to seamlessly deploy the experience as an extra curricular activity, with minimum teachers overhead. To measure the effect of the experience on the students attitude, we have carried on a survey (pre-test and post-test), adapted from an already existing attitudes towards statistics scale, on two student groups (intervention and control). Results show that intervention group presents higher increments in attitudes in the three analysed dimensions (usefulness, likeness, and motivation) respect to the control group. We have also conducted a satisfaction survey on intervention group, that show that a mean of 80% of students evaluate as positive (agree or strongly agree) the experience. Final grades, however, do not present significant differences.