Use this experiment to assess the effectiveness of different Internet search engines. Gather your class together and, using the chalkboard, come up with a list of 10 single or short phrase search terms that you will enter into search engines. As a class, enter each search term into each search engine and click on all of the links provided on the first page of each engine. Note whether or not the content of the website is relevant to the search term. For example, if you searched for "football stadiums," click each link on the first page of each search engine and count how many are relevant to football stadiums. One search engine, for example, may have six out of 10 pages listed that are relevant to football stadiums, while another may have nine out of 10. Teach students about how polluted and crowded the Internet is, and how a significant amount of the material available is not useful or relevant to the searches performed.
This experiment demonstrates the importance of strong, difficult-to-hack passwords to your young computer scientists. Set up three email accounts under a sample name, such as John Smith. Give the three accounts an easy, intermediate and difficult password respectively and encourage students to try and break into the email accounts. Observe how many times children are successful before presenting the results as percentages to your class. Often, children will find the easy and intermediate passwords quite easy to break into, which will lead them to think about the strength of their own passwords and consider making a change to increase their security.
Another important area of computer security that you can use for an experiment to educate children is Internet privacy. Children should search for their own names and nicknames using an Internet search engine. Make sure your classroom computer Internet filters are working to ensure they do not see undesirable or harmful content accidentally. Encourage students to note when they see references to themselves online, including their telephone number, home address, email address and any photographs of themselves. Students often will find several results relating to themselves or family, so prompt them to think about their social networking privacy settings and how information is still able to leak onto the Internet.
Provide a small number of your students with a typing-speed test and note their results. Then, encourage them to complete a typing course using typing software, which might involve them doing 20 minutes work each day for a month. Once the course is completed by all the small group of students, ask them to take a typing-speed test similar to the one they completed at the beginning of the experiment. Students commonly will find that their typing speed has improved noticeably thanks to the training course. They then can present results that display the effectiveness of the typing software, which has both a scientific interest (that we can train to get faster at typing), and a consumer interest (typing-enhancement software is effective.)