VPET: A Novel Visual Privacy Themed Cybersecurity Educational Game

This full paper in the innovative practice category introduces a uniquely novel visual privacy themed game, which is meant to be used as an experiential learning tool for teaching plus demonstration of fundamental data privacy concepts and basic security concepts. To our knowledge, this new, innovative visual privacy themed game, as presented in this paper, is the first of its kind gamified educational tool, which makes use of the privacy through visual anonymity i.e. VPET (Visual Privacy Enhancing Technology) theme for effective illustration of privacy concepts along with basic security concepts. This paper describes our nifty, visually interactive VPET game, which teaches privacy plus security concepts through the PET illustration and demonstrates applied cryptography for privacy-driven de-identification through obscuration-based disguise tasks during the game play. It also discusses how we have successfully used a pilot, proof of concept prototype version of this game over the last few years for cybersecurity education and outreach primarily at the K-12 level. Over the last few years, we have surveyed several VPET game players, who are from a large, diverse group of K-12 community members, consisting mainly of high school students and teachers, who have played the VPET game, as part of several cybersecurity training camps and outreach workshop sessions, and have benefited from this exercise in terms of learning, as well as developing awareness plus interest in privacy and security topics. This paper shares and analyze the preliminary data collected from all these survey responses to evaluate the prospects of our unique VPET game as a potential educational and outreach tool for engaging K-12 learners, for teaching privacy plus security concepts, and for creating awareness plus interest in cybersecurity. In summary, we demonstrate how our unique VPET gamification approach for educational purposes can successfully engage students for effective learning of data privacy and cybersecurity concepts.