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

教育 DCL：EAGER：用于故事驱动的教育黑客游戏的游戏化教育平台，以吸引 Z 世代加入网络劳动力

• 批准号: 2335839
• 负责人: Ersin Dincelli
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Denver
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-10-01 至 2025-09-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2335839&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Education; DCL; EAGER; Gamified; Platform

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.

全球熟练和多样化的网络安全劳动力的短缺是一个紧迫的问题，危害个人，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的教育平台来吸引年轻一代人进入网络安全。通过使用设计科学研究（DSR）方法和游戏化技术，该平台试图使网络安全教育更具吸引力，易于访问和愉悦感。此外，它使教育游戏能够设计自定义的教育游戏，从而在教学中促进创意。该平台的可定制性和可扩展性创造了一个协作生态系统，以开发，完善和共享内容，从而确保其持续的有效性和更广泛的影响。最终，通过使网络安全教育更加受欢迎，该项目试图建立一项基于游戏的教学计划，激发和吸引多样化的学生人数，尤其是代表性不足的少数群体，以促进该领域的包容性，并为更熟练和多样化的劳动力促进一个更加熟练的劳动力。该平台由Unity Game Engine提供支持，提供了动态的3D世界地图和故事情节，其中包括任务，进步点，奖励和发人深省的道德决策组件。这些任务是精心设计的，旨在结合基本的网络安全概念，以现实生活中的实例来促进经验丰富的学习。 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 integrated with existing cybersecurity curricula, fostering creativity and adaptability to divergent teaching styles; （c）建立一个从事扩展和完善平台的教育工作者社区，促进合作并促进协同影响。从这项工作中收集的见解将使项目的影响范围扩大到网络安全，使其他教育领域受益，并培养一个更具网络感知的社会。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛影响的审查标准通过评估来通过评估来获得的支持。