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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
References
Abt, C.C.: Serious games. University Press of America, New York (1987)
Aguilera-Hermida, A.P.: College students’ use and acceptance of emergency online learning due to Covid-19. Int. J. Educ. Res. Open 1, 100011 (2020)
Barata, G., Gama, S., Jorge, J., Gonçalves, D.: Engaging engineering students with gamification. In: 2013 5th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES), pp. 1–8. IEEE (2013)
Chicone, R., Burton, T.M., Huston, J.A.: Using facebook’s open source capture the flag platform as a hands-on learning and assessment tool for cybersecurity education. Int. J. Conceptual Struct. Smart Appl. (IJCSSA) 6(1), 18–32 (2018)
Chothia, T., Novakovic, C.: An offline capture the flag-style virtual machine and an assessment of its value for cybersecurity education. In: 2015 USENIX Summit on Gaming, Games, and Gamification in Security Education (3GSE 2015). USENIX Association (2015). https://www.usenix.org/conference/3gse15/summit-program/presentation/chothia
Deeb, F.A., Hickey, T.J.: Teaching introductory cryptography using a 3d escape-the-room game. In: 2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2019)
Ford, V., Siraj, A., Haynes, A., Brown, E.: Capture the flag unplugged: an offline cyber competition. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pp. 225–230 (2017)
Fortes Tondello, G., Premsukh, H., Nacke, L.: A theory of gamification principles through goal-setting theory. In: 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2018)
González-Tablas, A.I., González Vasco, M.I., Cascos, I., Planet Palomino, Á.: Shuffle, cut, and learn: Crypto go, a card game for teaching cryptography. Mathematics 8(11), 1993 (2020)
Hart, S., Margheri, A., Paci, F., Sassone, V.: Riskio: A serious game for cyber security awareness and education. Comput. Secur. 95, 101827 (2020)
Heubl, B.: Retro-gaming boom during lockdown (2020). https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/05/retro-gaming-boom-during-lockdown/ Accessed 16 Feb 2021
Jin, G., Tu, M., Kim, T.H., Heffron, J., White, J.: Evaluation of game-based learning in cybersecurity education for high school students. J. Educ. Learn. (EduLearn) 12(1), 150–158 (2018)
Marczewski, A.: Periodic Table of Gamification Elements (2020). https://www.gamified.uk/user-types/gamification-mechanics-elements/ Accessed 16 Feb 2021
Mostafa, M., Faragallah, O.S.: Development of serious games for teaching information security courses. IEEE Access 7, 169293–169305 (2019)
Nurse, J.R.C.: Cybercrime and you: How criminals attack and the human factors that they seek to exploit. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology. OUP (2019)
Roepke, R., Koehler, K., Drury, V., Schroeder, U., Wolf, M.R., Meyer, U.: A pond full of phishing games - analysis of learning games for anti-phishing education. In: Hatzivasilis, G., Ioannidis, S. (eds.) MSTEC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12512, pp. 41–60. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62433-0_3
Scholefield, S., Shepherd, L.A.: Gamification techniques for raising cyber security awareness. In: Moallem, A. (ed.) HCII 2019. LNCS, vol. 11594, pp. 191–203. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22351-9_13
Schreuders, Z.C., Butterfield, E.: Gamification for teaching and learning computer security in higher education. In: 2016 USENIX Workshop on Advances in Security Education (ASE 2016) (2016)
Sheng, S., et al.: Anti-phishing Phil: the design and evaluation of a game that teaches people not to fall for phish. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, pp. 88–99 (2007)
Švábenskỳ, V., Čeleda, P., Vykopal, J., Brišáková, S.: Cybersecurity knowledge and skills taught in capture the flag challenges. Comput. Secur. 102, 102154 (2021)
Švábenskỳ, V., Vykopal, J., Cermak, M., Laštovička, M.: Enhancing cybersecurity skills by creating serious games. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, pp. 194–199 (2018)
Welbers, K., Konijn, E.A., Burgers, C., de Vaate, A.B., Eden, A., Brugman, B.C.: Gamification as a tool for engaging student learning: a field experiment with a gamified app. E-Learn. Digit. Media 16(2), 92–109 (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jaffray, A., Finn, C., Nurse, J.R.C. (2021). SherLOCKED: A Detective-Themed Serious Game for Cyber Security Education. In: Furnell, S., Clarke, N. (eds) Human Aspects of Information Security and Assurance. HAISA 2021. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 613. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81111-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81111-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-81110-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-81111-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)