I'm super excited to share this week's activity with you all. I try to come up with activities for the students to do on Fridays that are different from our day to day routine. I know the last thing I want to do on Friday is to listen to myself talk, and I'm sure the students don't want to sit and take notes every day of the week. I've thought about creating a series of some of the activities I do with my kiddos on Fridays, and decided to jump right in this week!
For the first week of school, I'm going to be going over evaluating expressions with my Algebra 1 students, including exponents. I discovered the website http://robertkaplinsky.com/ and found a great activity there on how to create strong passwords that used exponents in the real world! I decided to adapt the lesson plan I found there, and created my own worksheet to accompany the activity.
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The video shows that a computer can crack a simple password in seconds!
After scaring the students that all of their social media accounts will be hacked, we will go over the math that works behind password requirements. The students will discuss how different characters (uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols) affect how many potential passwords a computer would have to guess before choosing the correct one. They will also discuss how different lengths affect the total amount of potential passwords, and come up with a generalized formula for amount of possible passwords for different requirements. (Amount of potential characters ^ number of characters used).
To really bring students up to speed with password technology, I show them this article which states that a supercomputer can cycle through 350 billion passwords per second! Second!!
So now that they are really scared about what they decide to upload to the internet, (as they should be) I split the students up into groups of 3-4. Together they will come up with a set of password requirements that they feel will make their passwords secure. They will also use their new real world knowledge of exponents to calculate how long it would take a computer to hack a password with their group's requirements. Finally, they will decide what they believe is the single most important requirement for a strong password!
To end the lesson I will explain to them that most websites have security measures in place to prevent computers from hacking passwords using this method. If there are 218 trillion possible passwords, the probability of a computer guessing correctly withing the 5-6 tries before the website locks the account are nearly impossible. =)
And that's it! This may be a two day lesson plan depending on the amount of time you have. I intend on completing the lesson in 40 minutes, but we all know how that goes.
If you are interested in seeing the original activity, it is available for free at http://robertkaplinsky.com/work/how-can-we-make-stronger-passwords/
If you would like to download a copy of my adaptation and accompanying worksheet, you may do so here!
Thanks for reading.
Ms. B.
To end the lesson I will explain to them that most websites have security measures in place to prevent computers from hacking passwords using this method. If there are 218 trillion possible passwords, the probability of a computer guessing correctly withing the 5-6 tries before the website locks the account are nearly impossible. =)
And that's it! This may be a two day lesson plan depending on the amount of time you have. I intend on completing the lesson in 40 minutes, but we all know how that goes.
If you are interested in seeing the original activity, it is available for free at http://robertkaplinsky.com/work/how-can-we-make-stronger-passwords/
If you would like to download a copy of my adaptation and accompanying worksheet, you may do so here!
Thanks for reading.
Ms. B.
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