School-based Cybersecurity Education Programme for Schoolchildren in South Africa! A Timely Call from Bloemfontein

Abstract

The interconnection of many countries of the world today is hugely tied to the overwhelming improvements in the Internet. However, the improved Internet connectivity is not without diverse security risks such as bullying, scamming, hate speech, and identity theft especially for minors. It is unfortunate that the security risks attached to the use of the Internet are often ignored in the rush to log online by schoolchildren in South Africa. The cyber insecurities in South Africa became more precarious as schools do not teach cybersecurity as a subject in South Africa at present. Consequently, it behooves the researcher to unveil how the agents of education in South Africa learning ecologies can use the school-based cyber security education programme to protect schoolchildren against cyber scammers, and propose a blue-print on developing a school-based cybersecurity education programme for South African schoolchildren. In this paper, the space transition theory is used to explain the causation of insecurities confronting cyber savvy schoolchildren in South Africa. This paper methodically explicated related scientific papers that were published from 2005 to 2019 on cybercrimes, cybersecurity, and school-based participatory research. The community-driven model developed by Lavery et al. (2005) was used to design the school-based cybersecurity educational programme. This paper exhaustively explained the operations of the school-based cybersecurity educational programme and illustrated how teachers can use the informal cybersecurity educational programme to teach cybersecurity in South African schools.