Enhancing Cybersecurity Education Through Research-Based Role-Playing

Course-based research experiences have been demonstrated to improve student outcomes across various computing domains, including cybersecurity. These experiences are crucial to help prepare students to address the complex and evolving challenges associated with securing interconnected cyber physical systems in the digital age. While role-playing paper-reading seminars have been leveraged within graduate seminars as a pedagogical strategy to develop broad research skills across graduate students, the integration of this technique into undergraduate and graduate coursework has not been described in the literature. This paper describes the implementation of a roleplaying paper reading assignment as part of an undergraduate and graduate course on cybersecurity. Pre- and post-assessments are conducted to assess the experience of participants as a function of their academic standing. While individual roles preferences are shown to vary across groups, assessment results demonstrate the general effectiveness of deploying this project as a project assignment within cyber security courses.