Fall Research 2016: Week 3
Ref 1:
David H. Tobey, Portia Pusey, and Josh Chin. 2015. Cybersecurity Competitions in Education: Engaging Learners through Improved Game Balance. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People Research (SIGMIS-CPR '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 99 -100. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.courseinfo.wssu.edu:2048/10.1145/2751957.2751969
This article discusses the difficulty of gamification and game balance. The difficulty of gamification of education is to provide pathways to mastery where the challenges are just within reach of a learner’s ability to solve them so that competition activities remain “pleasantly frustrating” for the learner. Unfortunately, “pleasantly frustrating” is difficult to achieve. Players have diverse competencies, such as knowledge, skill and abilities. Currently, there is a lack of information about which competencies certain game objectives require to achieve a successful performance. According to the article, matching player competence with game objectives, or game balancing, is a crucial aspect. This is what allows cyber-security competitions to engage players and increase their learning, while also encouraging their pursuit of cyber-security as a profession.
Ref 2:
Ian Cullinane, Catherine Huang, Thomas Sharkey, and Shamsi Moussavi. 2015. "Cyber security education through gaming cyber-security games can be interactive, fun, educational and engaging". J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 30, 6 (June 2015), 75-81.
This article focuses on the challenges of teaching cyber-security. Among those challenges is the challenge of educating minors in the safe and responsible use of the Internet. Up to now, many computer games have been created with the purpose of teaching these concepts. In this article, students at MassBay Community College researched and evaluated currently available games. The games were evaluated based on their effectiveness in teaching the material and keeping students engaged. The students' end goal was to develop new game platforms to teach cyber-security based on the evaluation criteria. After the research and evaluation of games currently available to better understand the current market, this project focused on developing new games with the intent of teaching cyber security concepts to minors aged 11-14.
Ref 3:
Sandro Fouché and Andrew H. Mangle. 2015. "Code hunt as platform for gamification of cyber-security training". In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering (CHESE 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9-11. DOI=10.1145/2792404.2792406 http://doi.acm.org.courseinfo.wssu.edu:2048/10.1145/2792404.2792406
This article speaks on how cyber-security suffers from barriers to entry that include expensive training, exclusionary culture, and the need for costly infrastructure. In order for students to start learning about cyber-security, there mus be an ease of access to training, infrastructure and subject matter experts. It goes on to discuss the existing Code Hunt framework, which is used to help students master programming. It describes how such a framework could be a launchpad to help reduce the challenges facing students interested in cyber-security. Code Hunt offers gamification, community supported development, and a cloud infrastructure that provides an easy route to immediate learning. Using Code Hunt’s structured gaming model can help address the aforementioned weaknesses, thereby making cyber-security training more accessible to individuals without the means or desire to participate in traditional cyber-security competitions.