Cyber Security Educational Games for Children: A Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews 91 cyber security educational games for children, highlighting their positive learning impacts and identifying significant gaps in design processes, evaluation rigor, and technology use.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing educational games, revealing strengths and critical gaps, and proposes future research directions for improved game design and evaluation.

Findings

Positive learning outcomes demonstrated

Design and evaluation gaps identified

Limited use of emerging technologies

Abstract

Educational games have been widely used to teach children about cyber security. This systematic literature review reveals evidence of positive learning outcomes, after analysing 91 such games reported in 68 papers published between 2010 and 2024. However, critical gaps have also been identified regarding the design processes and the methodological rigour, including lack of systematic design, misalignment between proposed and achieved learning outcomes, rare use of control groups, limited discussions on ethical considerations, and underutilisation of emerging technologies. We recommend multiple future research directions, e.g., a hybrid approach to game design and evaluation that combines bottom-up and top-down approaches.