Enhancing Cybersecurity Skills by Creating Serious Games

TL;DR

This paper explores how creating educational cybersecurity games enhances students' understanding of attack and defense strategies, improves soft skills, and raises awareness through active learning in a university setting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach where students learn cybersecurity by designing educational games, supported by course design, assessment methods, and observed positive outcomes.

Findings

Students gained deep understanding of cybersecurity concepts.

Peer reviews rated the games highly for quality and educational value.

Open day events increased cybersecurity awareness at the faculty.

Abstract

Adversary thinking is an essential skill for cybersecurity experts, enabling them to understand cyber attacks and set up effective defenses. While this skill is commonly exercised by Capture the Flag games and hands-on activities, we complement these approaches with a key innovation: undergraduate students learn methods of network attack and defense by creating educational games in a cyber range. In this paper, we present the design of two courses, instruction and assessment techniques, as well as our observations over the last three semesters. The students report they had a unique opportunity to deeply understand the topic and practice their soft skills, as they presented their results at a faculty open day event. Their peers, who played the created games, rated the quality and educational value of the games overwhelmingly positively. Moreover, the open day raised awareness about cybersecurity and research and development in this field at our faculty. We believe that sharing our teaching experience will be valuable for instructors planning to introduce active learning of cybersecurity and adversary thinking.