This year, the first USENIX Summit on Gaming, Games, and Gamification in Security Education (3GSE) was held, co-located with USENIX Security ’14. The summit challenged designers, organizers, gamers, and educators to consider how we assess and improve the current state of security games, both in and out of the classroom.
3GSE featured a panel devoted to capture the flag (CTF) competitions and their use in education, bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders interested in how we both run and evaluate those games. The discussion expressed a fascinating mix of hacker values, student-centric learning approaches, and technical issues inherent to running these complex competitions. I had the opportunity to follow up with our panelists—Peter Chapman, Andrew Davis, Chris Eagle, Portia Pusey, and Giovanni Vigna—to reflect on the highlights of that discussion.
