Teaching Cyber Security through Competition An Experience Report about a Participatory Training Workshop

DOI: 10.5176/2251-2195_CSEIT16.39

Authors: Akbar Siami Namin, Zenaida Aguirre-Muñoz, Keith S. Jones

Abstract: Training workshops and professional meetings are important tools for capacity building and professional development. These social events provide professionals and educators a platform where they can discuss and exchange constructive ideas, and receive feedback. In particular, competition-based training workshops where participants compete on solving similar and common challenging problems are effective tools for stimulating students’ learning and aspirations. This paper reports the results of a two-day training workshop where memory and disk forensics were taught using a competition-based security educational tool. The workshop included training sessions for professionals, educators, and students to learn features of Tracer FIRE, a competition-based digital forensics and assessment tool, developed by Sandia National Laboratories. The results indicate that competitionbased training can be very effective in stimulating students’ motivation to learn. However, extra caution should be taken into account when delivering these types of training workshops.

Keywords: component; cyber security, digital forenciscs, partcipatory training workshop, competition-based learning, assessment