Abstract:

Students of the undergraduate course History of Informatics get acquainted with the most prevalent methods of Steganography and Cryptography in history as well as with up to date applications. To teach Cryptography and Steganography is complicated, because you need to plot figures and tables at the blackboard and calculating the frequency of characters in the text is consuming a lot of work and time. Concealing information behind pictures or voices is quite impossible to show on the blackboard and you can only partially explain how to apply the LSB (least significant bit) technique. Therefore we devised some applications which are appropriate to show all these algorithms. We wanted to know how effective are the programs we wrote in order to help understanding. The students of the Faculty of Applied Computer Science attended my lectures held at different times in two groups. In the first group, lectures were presented using the programs described above while lectures for the second group were delivered without the applications. Our hypothesis was that the group where we used the developed multimedia applications would get better marks in the papers written by them than the other. An analysis of the results (Man-Whitney test) showed significant difference in paper results of the two groups (p<0,05): results of students attending the multimedia lectures were better by half mark than the results of the control group. So using multimedia applications in teaching cryptography and steganography proved more productive, students understood the methods easier, and got better marks.

Keywords:

Steganography, cryptography, History of Computer Science, self-developed.