University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Doi
Abstract
We analyze the thesis that a fully immersive gamified learning platform benefits students, improving their enjoyment, time management, and performance by engaging them with the subject matter. We assert that an immersive experience centered around a true game produces better results than exercises with just a few gamified elements (e.g., points, badges, and leaderboards), which are the most common forms of gamification. To this end, we present Riposte, an online gamified learning platform with a 2D action game at its core. To analyze student behavior and support less gamified assignments (to serve as contrasting examples), Riposte is designed to be a single, unified experience for students, with an integrated development environment (Jupyter Notebook) built in. In outlining this system, we give particular emphasis to its security, as it was developed for use in the "Introduction to Computer Security" course at our university. The topic of cybersecurity presents a number of interesting challenges for an online gamified learning platform – aspects of the framework must be insecure enough to be hackable, but secure enough not to be abused. We evaluate the system over three semesters, highlighting many pitfalls and lessons learned but, in the end, demonstrating that it successfully improved student enjoyment, time management, and performance. Furthermore, based on our experiences with the platform, we offer a number of suggestions and recommendations that we hope will help those considering gamification as a winning educational strategy in computer science, cybersecurity, and beyond.Doctor of Philosoph
