Online safety and digital citizenship are becoming more and more important as lessons our children need to learn. To that end, the Australian government has created a thorough, but fun, site for helping students to get this information while they play. budd:e is a site that is available in formats for both primary and secondary students.
I have not investigated the secondary version, but the primary version allows the user to “build” a robot by meeting certain challenges, learning about cybersecurity along the way. There are teacher resources that include lesson plans in addition to the student portion of the site.
The site is free, but you do have to register. You are encouraged, however, to NOT give your real name. The only small glitch I found was that, since the site is based in Australia, you must input a “school post code” to register. I found, however, that by typing in any 4 numbers, I was given a new box with choices for “homeschool” or “other”.
budd:e is a flash-based site, so you won’t be able to use it on iDevices.
