SherLOCKED: A Detective-themed Serious Game for Cyber Security Education

TL;DR

SherLOCKED is a detective-themed serious game designed to enhance cybersecurity education by engaging undergraduate students through interactive puzzles, effectively reinforcing foundational security concepts and increasing learning engagement.

Contribution

The paper introduces SherLOCKED, a novel serious game for cybersecurity education, developed based on existing gamification principles and evaluated with students to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Findings

The game is engaging and fun for students.

SherLOCKED effectively reinforces cybersecurity concepts.

Students showed increased engagement with course content.

Abstract

Gamification and Serious Games are progressively being used over a host of fields, particularly to support education. Such games provide a new way to engage students with content and can complement more traditional approaches to learning. This article proposes SherLOCKED, a new serious game created in the style of a 2D top-down puzzle adventure. The game is situated in the context of an undergraduate cyber security course, and is used to consolidate students' knowledge of foundational security concepts (e.g. the CIA triad, security threats and attacks and risk management). SherLOCKED was built based on a review of existing serious games and a study of common gamification principles. It was subsequently implemented within an undergraduate course, and evaluated with 112 students. We found the game to be an effective, attractive and fun solution for allowing further engagement with content that students were introduced to during lectures. This research lends additional evidence to the use of serious games in supporting learning about cyber security.