LEARNING CYBER SECURITY: TEACHING TECHNICALLY CHALLENGING TOPICS WITH GAMES AND VIRTUAL LABORATORIES

The learning trends are going towards the application of Internet, where the students learn by autonomous self-study approaches. In future, the need for constructing a sufficient learning environment to support the technically challenging topics is almost mandatory for developing a curriculum, which caters to the pedagogical needs and practical requirements. In this paper, we present our initial results, designs and a proposal for a learning environment, which combines games, virtual communications laboratory environment and a traditional self-study course into a framework, which enables the students to learn and practice cybersecurity with varying degrees of tools. These tools vary from games, which teach the fundamental aspects, to a full virtual laboratory, which allows realistic exercises and simulation of attack scenarios.