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Title: Development and Evaluation of Cybersecurity Education Games for High School Students
Cybersecurity workforce development is the key to protecting information and information systems, and yet more than 30% of companies are short on security expertise. To address this need, the current authors have developed four cybersecurity education games to teach social engineering, secure online behavior, cyber defense methods, and cybersecurity first principles. These games are intended to recruit the next generation cybersecurity workforce by developing an innovative cybersecurity curriculum and pedagogical methods to provide high school students with hands-on activities in a game-based learning environment. Purdue University Northwest (PNW) offered high school summer camps for 181 high school students in June of 2016 and June of 2017. Out of 181 high school participants, 107 were underrepresented minority students, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. To evaluate the effectiveness of the cybersecurity education games, post-camp surveys were conducted with 154 camp participants. The survey results indicated that the games were very effective in cybersecurity awareness training. Furthermore, the cybersecurity education games were more effective for male students than female students in raising student interest in computer science and cybersecurity.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1723666
NSF-PAR ID:
10105765
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International journal of engineering research & innovation
Volume:
10
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2152-4157
Page Range / eLocation ID:
25-35
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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