Making Cybersecurity Education Fun Through Gamification and Humor

No ratings

Presented at ISC2SecureSummit 2019 by

Dr. Hasib

The world of education is changing in two profound ways: 1. Competency-based education and a student’s ability to do things has become far more important than their ability to know things. 2. Digitally powered virtual classrooms and laboratories are increasing access and lowering the costs of education. Competency-based education allows employers to quickly judge what a prospective employee can do. Prospective employees can show tangible projects completed during their educational journey to support their application. However, digitally powered education can result in a sense of disengagement among all parties. Finally, most cybersecurity education content can be dry and arduous for students - specially career changers. These problems can be solved by injecting some new ways to engage such as the following: 1. Collaborative learning through peer review of student work. 2. Student led lectures based on deeper research of a class topic and delivered with the inclusion of games such as Cybersecurity Millionaire, Cybersecurity Jeopardy, and Cybersecurity Bingo along with funny cartoons and videos to illustrate complex and dry material. 3. Project based assignments on real world issues and problems with a requirement for students to analyze the problems and to make recommendations. Use of these techniques at two major universities resulted in a much higher level of student learning, retention, and overall learning satisfaction. Students also did better at job interviews and conference presentations because of the their practical experiences.