Professor Margit Scholl, PhD, is Professor for Business Informatics and Administra­tive IT in the Faculty of Business, Computing, and Law at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau (TH Wildau) situated to the southeast of Berlin. Her research and teaching work centers on process and project management, (mobile) business applications, information security and privacy protection including baseline protection and awareness, multimedia approaches, and learning methods. Prof. Scholl has assembled a team for research projects in the area of innovation in teaching and learning. The team is completely supported by external funding, in line with the fact that the TH Wildau has a strong focus on the combination of research and teaching. The team has been carefully chosen to bring together a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches, application-oriented research, and modern teaching experience.

She has developed a “Certified Further Training Course for IT Security Officers in Public Administration and SMEs” and a “Certified Further Training Course for Data Protection Officers in Accordance with the EU GDPR for Public Administration and SMEs.” In addition, she offers trainings and examinations for the European Computer Driving License (ECDL), with the prospect of further trainings in the future for practitioners and consultants in IT baseline protection (IT-Grundschutz) in line with ISO/IEC 27001. A parallel certification hierarchy has also been put in place for students.

Two different research projects run by the TH Wildau on information security awareness —titled “Security” and “SecAware4school” for short— are primarily aimed at sensitizing pupils to the issue of information secu­ri­ty in everyday school life using experience-oriented scenarios geared to teaching aware­ness. At the same time, their teachers will be trained and the parents kept informed about specific measures. The learning scenarios were developed in creative workshops by means of participative dialogue and are based on the integration of three learning methods: Game-Based Learning, Accelerated Learning, and Authentic Learning. The article introduces the game-based learning scenarios for schools implemented to date.

Questions were:

• The warm-up question about secure passwords
• The question “Do you know how you can protect your own private sphere online?”
• The question “How often do you use images from the Internet, e.g. for presentations?”
• The question “Have you ever been the victim of data theft (e.g. your log-in data was stolen)?”
• The question “To what extent are you interested in the following topics?”
• The question “What other topics are you interested in?”

The topic of fake news is of similar interest to all respondents from the pilot schools (who find the issue very to moderately interesting).

The results of the survey, the information events, and the prototypes in “SecAware4school” as well as the final versions in “Security” of learning scenarios confirmed the assumption that sensitization and training is needed on the topic of information security in everyday school life.