The awards had three categories: “Best Digital Lesson” for teachers, “Adults and Children on the Internet” for parents, and “Best Youth Project” for schoolchildren from 14 to 18 years of age. More than 1200 people from almost all regions of Russia applied for the awards. According to the decision of the contest jury, consisting of IT industry, media group and business figures as well as representatives of educational organizations, it was the most original and innovative projects created by parents, teachers and young people, and aimed at developing digital skills and building a safe digital environment that were awarded prizes.
Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Chernyshenko, along with Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media Bella Cherkesova, Chairperson of the Board of Directors at Global Rus Trade LLC Anna Nesterova and Chairperson of the Alliance for the Protection of Children in the Digital Environment Elizaveta Belyakova, joined the awards ceremony.
“Children have Internet access since early childhood and preschool years. Since we began our work a year and a half ago, we’ve managed to create a community of sympathetic kids, parents and teachers who we can join forces with to create a safe digital environment. The awards established by the Alliance will give us an incentive to create new projects,” Ms. Belyakova noted.
The Alliance’s award in the youth category was won by middle school students Ksenia Senyushkina, Alexandra Diachkovskaya, Maria Gushchina and Elmira Skriabina, who, under the guidance of their teacher Anna Zakharova, had built a team training and instructing cybervolunteers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) — CYBERVOLUNTEERS.YAKT. Since 2020, the team has organized 86 educational events dedicated to infosec and trained more than 80 volunteers.
Eugenia Arnakova (Sevastopol), creator of the “Cyberspace” project, ranked first among teachers. Since 2021, she has achieved impressive results, namely trained 6220 students enrolled in an educational course on the Stepik platform, 455 participants in a regional online cybersecurity contest and 120 finalists in the SafeZone Fest—a regional festival focusing on cybersecurity and IT.
What the award-winning team of parents—Olesya Boguslavskaya, Alina Varlakhina and Victoria Raspopina (Krasnoyarsk Krai)—submitted for examination by the jury was a series of animated vertical public service announcement videos, On the Other Side of the Screen, informing about the dangerous situations that children aged 6–14 years can get into online.
The runners-up were developers of the cybersecurity chatbots “Digital Bot Mark” (Lipetsk) and “NETY” (Bolokhovo, Tula Oblast); the “You’re Not Alone” project team, who created the Antibullying skill for Alice, a Russian voice assistant (Lipetsk); “School for Child Safety Online” (Kostroma); “Safe Information Environment for Children” (Moscow), a methodological platform for teachers; and a media literacy project, “Living in the Digital Age” (Vladivostok, Primorsky Krai).
The main prize awarded to each contest winner was a mentorship mini course held at a member company of the Alliance. The winners selected the companies they found most interesting in terms of further developing and scaling-up their projects: Yandex, VK and Gazprom Media Holding. Those who ranked second and third also received valuable prizes from all the members of the Alliance: gift subscriptions to streaming services, smart speakers, soundbars and corporate merch—from hoodies to mugs.
