The Serious Play Conference and a Canadian Solution to Cyber-Education

The Serious Play Conference took place in August at University of Toronto's Mississauga (Erindale) campus. Even though I'd fallen off the end of my secondments, gamification has also been a central tenant of my teaching practice and I've been actively researching cyber-education using immersive simulations for the past four years, so I took this opportunity to present what I'd found.

Paul Darvasi runs this conference. I met him last summer when we did a quantum training week together at UBC in hopes of building a quantum game that takes the academic privilege out of how the subject is presented. That hasn't yet come to be, but I did manage to recently get our quantum arcade idea funded (from Finland because finding that kind of support for emerging technology education in Canada isn't easy). Canada likes to be surprised by emerging technology in education rather than getting in front of it.

Quantum Arcade Pitch Deck for Unitary Fund.pptx

Games have played a central role in my life. I got into Dungeons & Dragons in a big way in my teens and my first long distance road trips were with friends to GENCON in Milwaukee in the late 1980s (where I got to play a tournament round of D&D with Gary Gygax!!!). As a result my teaching practice has always been informed by those early years dungeon mastering. If I have an opportunity to create a simulation or immersive gaming experience in my classroom, I'll go out of my way to arrange that rather than falling back on worksheets peddling dimensionless knowledge transmission. My experience has shown me that suspension of disbelief can be a powerful learning tool if the gamified learning experience is pedagogically viable.

My presentation at Serious Play was specifically about how immersive simulation can help learners tackle subjects that might scare them into disengagement. By using suspension of disbelief, subjects like cybersecurity can be approached without out the risk aversion prompted by worries about breaking technology almost no one understands because we seem to have given up on modern media literacy about two decades ago.

I've put students on Field Effect's Cyber Range in classrooms across Canada. In some cases they were competitive CyberTitan teams containing students with the top 1% of digital skills in the country, but in most cases it was with the other 99% who had never touched cybersecurity at any time in their learning journey. With the right scaffolding and support even the newest of n00bs can get their hands dirty iteratively learning essential cyber skills in this digital sandbox:

Engaging Canadian education with cybersecurity remains an uphill struggle, but cyber sandboxes like Field Effect's Cyber Range offer a solution.

The Serious Play Conference had a wide range of educators working in digital and analogue simulation across a staggering range of subject areas. From museums engaging patrons to a think tank designing war games for the Canadian Forces, it was a tour de force of what immersive simulation and gaming can do to engage and teach in every learning context.

I was absolutely thrilled to learn that our all Canadian made simulation that offers a key to cyber-education - one that is more advanced than the systems we use when our CyberTitans take part in CyberPatriot south of the border because it allows for interactive networking between virtual machines instead of just putting students into isolated desktop VMs - won the gold medal for K12 immersive learning simulation.

ICTC and Field Effect have worked hard to get this world class immersive learning opportunity in front of Canadian students. The trick now, as it has always been, is to get insular Canadian education systems who have taken a head-in-the-sand approach to cyber education to pick up this federally funded, world-class tool we've built and use it to get past their own fear and ignorance and begin teaching essential defensive 21st Century digital skills.

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Sign up for CyberTitan, Canada's national student cybersecurity competition, is open until October. Teams of girls and other under represented groups in the field are fully funded. The early rounds are on individual virtual machines through CyberPatriot in the US, but if you push on you eventually get to Field Effect's Cyber Range and get a taste of the future of cyber-education.

Check out the interactive team signup map here. You can ask yourself questions like, why one of Canada's smallest provinces (New Brunswick) has more student teams than Ontario and Quebec combined, or wonder why Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia have no teams at all. Perhaps they don't use the internet?

The vast majority (over 90%) of cyber attacks on Canadian systems depend on user ignorance to succeed. We can't build a secure Canada if oblivious Canadians keep opening the doors and letting criminals and foreign state actors into our house. You don't have to pretend it isn't happening, building this essential media literacy can start here now:

Join the competition and sign up student teams of 4-6.
There are middle and high school divisions and community groups are also welcome to participate.