Development and Validation of Serious Games for Teaching Cybersecurity

Serious games have shown great potential as an instructional tool in various fields by providing improved accessibility to simulations, modeling of environments, and visualizations. However, a challenging problem in the design of serious games has been to strike a fine balance between gaming and the pedagogical elements such as content, methodology of instruction, and evaluation. Several models and frameworks have been proposed to support the serious game’s design and analysis to address the above-mentioned gap. In this paper, we present a serious game design and validation process in the context of cybersecurity education. We assess the effectiveness of a serious game as an educational tool by using a game designed to teach network firewalls and validate the game’s effectiveness to meet the learning objectives by performing a preliminary analysis consisting of objective and subjective parts. The objective analysis is performed by capturing the player’s interaction data, while the subjective analysis consists of a survey study to understand the user experience. Furthermore, we also perform an analysis of our game using the Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics framework to highlight the interrelations between gaming and learning features. Our study demonstrates the significance of objective and subjective analysis, and our preliminary results on using our game to teach security have been found to be encouraging.