To Gamify or Not?: On Leaderboard Effects, Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes in a Cybersecurity Intervention

To Gamify or Not?: On Leaderboard Effects, Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes in a Cybersecurity Intervention

To Gamify or Not?: On Leaderboard Effects, Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes in a Cybersecurity Intervention

Mac Malone , Yicheng Wang, Kedrian James, Murray Anderegg, Jan Werner, Fabian Monrose

Abstract

“We present a gamified learning experience for cybersecurity education that is designed to provide learners with an understanding of the knowledge and techniques needed to solve everyday problems while simultaneously immersing them in a competitive environment. We provide a framework for measuring skills demonstrated by students within an active learning setting where the primary focus is on practical expertise. We also examine several unique aspects of designing such a gamified framework (e.g. the game itself must be insecure enough to be "hackable'', but secure enough not to be abused), and discuss how the framework was used to expose students to various security concepts.

We found that our gamified experience heavily engaged students. We also encountered many pain points during our intervention and discovered a number of important aspects of gamified settings that must be carefully considered.

For one, the goals of a semi-structured gamified exercise can sometimes lead to learners discovering solutions that do not meet the desired learning objectives. Furthermore, The exploratory nature of such exercises can also lead learners down a rabbit hole that, without a proper "safety net'', they may not exit. Finally, complex tasks modeled after real world applications can leave little room for error, frustrating students and limiting instructors' ability to accurately assess different levels of skill. Based on our experience designing this intervention, we provide a number of transferable recommendations. The challenges we faced and the lessons we learned can be invaluable to those considering gamification as a cybersecurity education strategy”.

Reference

Malone, M., Wang, Y., James, K., Anderegg, M., Werner, J., & Monrose, F. (2021, March). To Gamify or Not? On Leaderboard Effects, Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes in a Cybersecurity Intervention. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 1135-1141). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3408877.3432544  

Keywords 

Gamified, education, strategy