Criminal Investigations: An Interactive Experience to Improve Student Engagement and Achievement in Cybersecurity Courses

This paper presents Criminal Investigations, a gamified, scalable web-based framework for teaching and assessing Internet-of-Things (IoT) security skills. Criminal Investigations is packaged as a series of stackable IoT security activities; the current version uses React for the front-end development and Python for the back-end, and is deployed as a web application on a university server. Criminal Investigations promotes student engagement and learning by incorporating gamification concepts such as storytelling, experience points, just-in-time learning content delivery and checkpoints into activity design. This paper presents a pilot deployment of Criminal Investigations' first, fully-deployed, prototype activity "Reverse Engineering and Analyzing IoT Firmware". The results of the pilot deployment indicate that Criminal Investigations provides an engaging, user-friendly, accessible environment, and helps students achieve the learning objectives of the prototype activity.