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Criminal Investigations: An Interactive Experience to Improve Student Engagement and Achievement in Cybersecurity Courses

Published: 22 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents Criminal Investigations, a gamified, scalable web-based framework for teaching and assessing Internet-of-Things (IoT) security skills. Criminal Investigations is packaged as a series of stackable IoT security activities; the current version uses React for the front-end development and Python for the back-end, and is deployed as a web application on a university server. Criminal Investigations promotes student engagement and learning by incorporating gamification concepts such as storytelling, experience points, just-in-time learning content delivery and checkpoints into activity design. This paper presents a pilot deployment of Criminal Investigations' first, fully-deployed, prototype activity "Reverse Engineering and Analyzing IoT Firmware''. The results of the pilot deployment indicate that Criminal Investigations provides an engaging, user-friendly, accessible environment, and helps students achieve the learning objectives of the prototype activity.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Layering Sociotechnical Cybersecurity Concepts Within Project-Based LearningProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671093(406-418)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Automated feedback for participants of hands-on cybersecurity trainingEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-12265-829:9(11555-11584)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024

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  1. Criminal Investigations: An Interactive Experience to Improve Student Engagement and Achievement in Cybersecurity Courses

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1
      February 2022
      1049 pages
      ISBN:9781450390705
      DOI:10.1145/3478431
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 22 February 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. achievement
      2. education
      3. engagement
      4. gamification
      5. interactive
      6. reverse-engineering
      7. security
      8. teaching

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      • (2024)Layering Sociotechnical Cybersecurity Concepts Within Project-Based LearningProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671093(406-418)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
      • (2024)Automated feedback for participants of hands-on cybersecurity trainingEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-12265-829:9(11555-11584)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024

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