Engaged Student Learning with Gamified Labs: A New Approach for Hardware Security Education

Hardware security is an emerging field with farranging impacts on the design and implementation of the devices we use in our everyday lives – from wearable and implantable medical devices, to personal mobile devices, and even cloud devices powering the software services that drive our society forward. Practical, hands-on experience is vital to the training of students in this and other security-related fields. We are developing a new model for hardware security education using readily available, cost-efficient, off-the-shelf development boards, with hands-on experiments that offer new learning opportunities for students. Beyond this, we are experimenting with different pedagogical methods to improve student engagement. In particular, we aim to gamify a subset of the experiments and evaluate the impact on student engagement and learning. This work-inprogress paper describes our initial approach to the gamification of hardware security labs and reports on baseline results from our control study using a more traditional, non-gamified approach.