Using a Game to Teach About Phishing

Cyber security education has become increasingly critical as we spend more of our everyday lives online. Research shows that college students are mostly unaware of many online dangers. To teach students about cyber security using their preferred medium, gaming, we developed an educational 2D game called Bird's Life that aims to teach college students about phishing. Players will come to understand phishing attacks and how to avoid them in real world scenarios through a fun gaming context. The game can be deployed to multiple platforms such as PC, web and mobile devices. To measure the effect of this game on learning the concepts of cyber security, a pre-test, post-test and online survey were developed and used in the evaluation process. In Spring 2017, the game was used in the CSC1310 Computer programming I class and CSC3332 Fundamentals of Internet Systems class at Winston-Salem State University. Initial classroom evaluations show that students love this type of learning and they did perform better in the post-test after playing the game.