Legal eagles

The aim of this exercise is to identify and then summarise common laws and key legal terms relating to computing. You will need A3 paper and colour pencils.

1) Students work in pairs. Each pair has an A3 piece of paper and writes their names and a title at the top of the page.

2) Students then have two minutes to write down all over the paper all of the laws that they know. They should be encouraged to use colour, shapes (e.g. bubbles), diagrams and shorthand. Explain that this is a working set of rough notes so don't worry yet about making it look pretty. They should not use books or the Internet at this stage.

3) Explain that they should include any key facts they know that might be useful e.g. DPA 1998, 8 key principles, list the 8 principles, Copyright = legal protection from people using your intellectual property (poems, books etc) without permission / payment.

4) After two minutes (the teacher could have a big countdown clock on the whiteboard), everyone stops and passes the A3 sheet to another pair. They then add what is missing, add extra facts and make corrections (leaving the original information in place so it can be discussed later if necessary).

5) This is repeated 5 or 6 times as the teacher sees fit. Then the A3 sheet is returned to the original authors and students have a further 5 or 10 minutes, with books, the Internet and other pairs of students, to try and fill in any gaps.

6) Students then show what they have. They are given another two A3 pieces of paper and this time, each student has to organise into a mind map all of the information they have collected. This is the neat copy of their notes so it needs to be logical, use colour and they all need to produce their own mind map for this task.