In 7th grade Cyber Civics class, students recently completed a unit on “Privacy and Personal Information.” The very last lesson in this unit taught them the first line of defense when it comes to protecting your online information—passwords. In a lesson called “Making (and Remembering) Great Passwords’” students learned the seven rules for great passwords:
A GREAT password should:
- Be at least eight characters in length.
- Include a combination of upper and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers.
- Never include personal info.
- Never include name of family member, friend, or pet.
- Never include sequences (i.e., 12345)
- Never include a word found in dictionary (unless you change a letter to a symbol or number).
- Be changed regularly (at least every 6 months).
To help them remember these rules, the students played a guessing game. Everyone received the name of a famous person. They had to use this person as their “mnemonic device” to create a password. For example, a few years ago a student who picked Adele (the singer) as her memory device, came up with this password:
Sfttr24UK!!
Here’s what she did: She used the first initials of Adele’s well-known song “Set Fire to the Rain” (making them upper and lower case), added Adele’s age (at the time), from the UK, and awesome (!!). This password follows all seven rules, and by simply remembering Adele, this student should be able to remember this great password.
Here are some passwords three of this year’s seventh graders came up with. See if you an guess the famous person who inspired these (this is what the seventh graders had to do and they were amazingly good at it!).
See below for the answers.
Read more about Cyber Civics on our Digital Media Literacy page.
Quiz Answers:
1. Shakespeare
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. Katy Perry
