Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2020
Abstract
Cyber Space Odyssey (CSO) is a novel serious game supporting computer networking education by engaging students in a race to successfully perform various cybersecurity tasks in order to collect clues and solve a puzzle in virtual near-Earth 3D space. Each team interacts with the game server through a dedicated client presenting a multimodal interface, using a game controller for navigation and various desktop computer networking tools of the trade for cybersecurity tasks on the game's physical network. Specifically, teams connect to wireless access points, use packet monitors to intercept network traffic, decrypt and reverse engineer that traffic, craft well-formed and meaningful responses, and transmit those responses. Successful completion of these physical network actions to solve a sequence of increasingly complex problems is necessary to progress through the virtual, story-driven adventure. Use of the networking tools reinforces networking theory and offers hands-on practical training requisite for today's cyberoperators. This paper presents the learning outcomes targeted by a classroom intervention based on CSO, the design and implementation of the game, a pedagogical overview of the overall intervention, and four years of quantitative and qualitative data assessing its effectiveness.
Source Publication
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
Recommended Citation
K. Graham et al., "Cyberspace Odyssey: A Competitive Team-Oriented Serious Game in Computer Networking," in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 502-515, 1 July-Sept. 2020, doi: 10.1109/TLT.2020.3008607.
Comments
© 2020 The Authors
This is an open access article published by IEEE and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CC BY 4.0
Sourced from the published version of record cited below. Shared in accordance with guidelines posted at Sherpa for the source journal. [Published version pathway].
Author notes:
Author marked [*] was an AFIT graduate student at the time of publication.
Authors marked [i] were undergraduate interns at AFIT during the writing of this article.