Masters student wins London Hopper People's Choice award

The event, which featured women speakers talking about their research, took place on 25 May 2016.

Ms Cacuiat presented her masters project, which is supervised by Dr Kaska Porayska-Pomsta. The project, "Enhancing critical and analytical skills of young children as a means of increasing their online safety and security," focuses on exploring the risks that primary school children may encounter online, and looks at how they can be prevented.

Ms Cacuiat argues that by strengthening their critical and analytical thinking skills, young children can independently judge information and act accordingly in the online environment. 

Through developing Drongo, an online detective game based on Dmitry Davidoff's Werewolf game, Ms Cacuiat aims to engage children to think critically about cyber security.

The game tasks children aged 9-13 years old to solve cyber security crimes and explore real consequences. These consequences include a stranger impersonating a trusted friend, malware causing the loss of Facebook account control, and unauthorised disclosed private information affecting college applications. 

After working as a product manager on one of Pearson's digital learning platforms, Ms Cacuiat will start a Bloomsbury-funded PhD in November. Her research will focus on Learning Analytics in Project Based Learning at the UCL Knowledge Lab, under the joint supervision of Professor Rose Luckin (UCL KL) and Professor Alex Poulovasillis (Birkbeck Computer Science).

Links

• London Hopper 2016
• Dr Kaska Porayska-Pomsta's research profile
• Professor Rose Luckin's research profile
• Professor Alex Poulovasillis's research profile