Laundry Overflow: Engaging Diverse Students in CyberSecurity using Interactive Analogies

ABSTRACTPast research has shown interactive animations, and those that use real-life analogies in particular, can play an important role in providing the intuition required to understand Computer Science concepts. Nonetheless, the use of analogies continues to be under-explored in CS education compared to other STEM fields. To break the impasse, we aim to create and evaluate a set of interactive animations based on analogies to understand their efficacy. As our first addition, we have created an animation explaining the Buffer Overflow computer systems concept. Explaining the concept abstractly has had a track record of ineffectiveness in our department, since the concept of computer memory as a series of contiguous storage locations is so foreign to students. Instead, the animation uses the analogy of a dry-cleaning shop with a series of hangers to provide a concrete mental picture of computer memory. Students explore various dry-cleaning scenarios, in which customers drop off and pick up their laundry, to understand at their own pace when buffer overflows cause harm and when they are silently ignored. This animation: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/571317697/ (and others) will be provided as an open educational resource to instructors to encourage the use of interactive analogies in their teaching, and to undergraduate and K-12 students.