Education DCL: EAGER: A Gamified Education Platform for Story-driven Educational Hacking Games to Attract Generation Z to Cyber Workforce

University Of Colorado At Denver, Aurora CO

Investigators

Abstract

The global shortage of skilled and diverse cybersecurity workforce is a pressing issue, jeopardizing individual, organizational, and national security. To address this concern, this project aims to attract younger generations to cybersecurity through the development of a gamified education platform. By using Design Science Research (DSR) approach and gamification techniques, the platform seeks to make cybersecurity education more engaging, accessible, and enjoyable. Additionally, it enables educators to design customized educational games, fostering creativity in teaching. The platform’s customizability and extensibility create a collaborative ecosystem to develop, refine, and share content, ensuring its continued effectiveness and broader impact. Ultimately, by making cybersecurity education more welcoming, this project seeks to establish a transformative, game-based pedagogical initiative that inspires and engages a diverse student population, especially underrepresented minorities, to promote inclusion within the field and contribute to a more skilled and diverse workforce. The project utilizes a DSR approach and game-based learning to create an immersive gamified education platform centered around a story-driven educational hacking game. Powered by the Unity game engine, the platform offers a dynamic 3D world map and a storyline that includes quests, progression points, rewards, and thought-provoking ethical decision-making components. The quests are meticulously designed to incorporate fundamental cybersecurity concepts, promoting experiential learning with real-life examples. The platform’s primary objectives encompass three key aspects: (a) enabling the design of customized curricula for fundamental cybersecurity courses through a novel taxonomy of gamification elements and the Community of Inquiry framework, (b) providing educators with a user-friendly platform to create customized quests that seamlessly integrate with existing cybersecurity curricula, fostering creativity and adaptability to diverse teaching styles; and (c) establishing a community of educators engaged in extending and refining the platform, promoting collaboration and fostering synergistic impact. The insights gleaned from this endeavor will extend the project’s impact beyond cybersecurity, benefit other educational domains, and cultivate a more cyber-aware society. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.