Education DCL: EAGER: A Gamified Education Platform for Story-driven Educational Hacking Games to Attract Generation Z to Cyber Workforce

熟练和多样化的网络安全劳动力的全球短缺是一个紧迫的问题，危及个人，组织和国家安全。为了解决这一问题，该项目旨在通过开发游戏化教育平台，吸引年轻一代关注网络安全。通过使用设计科学研究（DSR）方法和游戏化技术，该平台旨在使网络安全教育更具吸引力、可访问性和乐趣。此外，它使教育工作者能够设计定制的教育游戏，培养教学中的创造力。该平台的可定制性和可扩展性创建了一个协作生态系统，用于开发、改进和共享内容，确保其持续有效性和更广泛的影响。最终，通过让网络安全教育更受欢迎，该项目旨在建立一种变革性的、基于游戏的教学计划，激励和吸引多样化的学生群体，特别是代表性不足的少数民族，以促进该领域的包容性，并为培养更熟练、更多样化的劳动力做出贡献。该项目利用DSR方法和基于游戏的学习，以故事驱动的教育黑客游戏为中心，创建一个沉浸式游戏化教育平台。该平台由Unity游戏引擎提供动力，提供动态3D世界地图和故事情节，包括任务，进度点，奖励和发人深省的道德决策组件。这些任务经过精心设计，融入了基本的网络安全概念，通过现实生活中的例子促进体验式学习。该平台的主要目标包括三个关键方面：(a)通过游戏化元素的新分类和探究社区框架，为基础网络安全课程设计定制课程；(b)为教育工作者提供一个用户友好的平台，创建与现有网络安全课程无缝集成的定制任务，培养创造力和对不同教学风格的适应性；(c)建立一个由教育者组成的社区，以扩展和完善该平台，促进协作并产生协同效应。从这一努力中收集到的见解将把项目的影响扩展到网络安全之外，造福于其他教育领域，并培养一个更具网络意识的社会。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The global shortage of skilled and diverse cybersecurity workforce is a pressing issue, jeopardizing individual, organizational, and national security. To address this concern, this project aims to attract younger generations to cybersecurity through the development of a gamified education platform. By using Design Science Research (DSR) approach and gamification techniques, the platform seeks to make cybersecurity education more engaging, accessible, and enjoyable. Additionally, it enables educators to design customized educational games, fostering creativity in teaching. The platform’s customizability and extensibility create a collaborative ecosystem to develop, refine, and share content, ensuring its continued effectiveness and broader impact. Ultimately, by making cybersecurity education more welcoming, this project seeks to establish a transformative, game-based pedagogical initiative that inspires and engages a diverse student population, especially underrepresented minorities, to promote inclusion within the field and contribute to a more skilled and diverse workforce.The project utilizes a DSR approach and game-based learning to create an immersive gamified education platform centered around a story-driven educational hacking game. Powered by the Unity game engine, the platform offers a dynamic 3D world map and a storyline that includes quests, progression points, rewards, and thought-provoking ethical decision-making components. The quests are meticulously designed to incorporate fundamental cybersecurity concepts, promoting experiential learning with real-life examples. The platform’s primary objectives encompass three key aspects: (a) enabling the design of customized curricula for fundamental cybersecurity courses through a novel taxonomy of gamification elements and the Community of Inquiry framework, (b) providing educators with a user-friendly platform to create customized quests that seamlessly integrate with existing cybersecurity curricula, fostering creativity and adaptability to diverse teaching styles; and (c) establishing a community of educators engaged in extending and refining the platform, promoting collaboration and fostering synergistic impact. The insights gleaned from this endeavor will extend the project’s impact beyond cybersecurity, benefit other educational domains, and cultivate a more cyber-aware society.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.