Abstract

Cooperative work in learning environments has been shown to be a successful extension to traditional learning systems due to the great impact of cooperation on students' motivation and learning success. In this paper we describe a new approach to cooperative construction of cryptographic protocols. Using an appropriate visual language (VL), students describe a protocol step by step, modeling subsequent situations and alternating this with the creation of a concept keyboard (CK) describing the operations in the protocol. The system automatically generates a colored Petri subnet that is matched against an existing action logic specifying the protocol. Finally, the learners implement role-dependent CKs in a cooperative workflow and perform a role-play simulation. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.