Safe Online Surfing Internet Challenge Available for New School Year
The FBI’s Safe Online Surfing (SOS) Internet Challenge—a free, fun, and innovative program that educates students in grades 3-8 on cyber safety and promotes cyber citizenship—is now open for business for the 2015-2016 school year.
The program engages participants in age-appropriate games, videos, and other interactive materials that cover such topics as cell phone safety, protection of personal information, password strength, instant messaging, social networking, and online gaming safety. FBI-SOS is coming off a banner year with the 2014-2015 school year, when a total of 275,656 students completed the exams, more than triple the previous year. Hopefully, the number of participants will continue to increase during this school year.
Anyone can complete the activities on the FBI-SOS website. The testing and competition, though, is only open—through teachers and/or administrators—to students in grades 3-8 at public, private, or home schools in the U.S. And at the end of each month during the school year, test scores are aggregated, and top-scoring schools receive an award from the FBI.