Conceptual analysis of cyber security education based on live competitions

Live competitions, i.e. Capture the Flag, provide noteworthy experiences for the participants while offering both hands-on practice and entertainment. Aiming at performing a conceptual analysis as a basis for improving their pedagogical utilization, we investigate a number of live competition paradigms and analyse their structure by decomposing them into their respective elements and defining their relations. Moreover, we record the possible obstacles related to the pedagogical utilization of live competitions and group them into distinct categories. As a result, we construct a concept map of the technological and pedagogical characteristics of live competitions. Based on the proposed concept map and the recorded obstacles, we present a comparative evaluation scheme that we employ on three live competition approaches from the literature in order to reveal their value with respect to the educational impact. Finally, we discuss the results of our study and suggest directions for its utilization in the phases of analysis, feasibility and assessment towards developing of new live competition approaches for educational purposes. The adopted assumptions can bind the design of new efforts in cyber security education domain such as gamification and game based learning approaches that need to rely on sound learning theories, e.g. cognitive and experiential learning.