Capture the Flag as Cyber Security Introduction

Introducing technical concepts to students with little to no technical background can be a challenging task for any teacher to achieve. The concept of gamification has been introduced recently as a method to motivate students by taking a variety of techniques found in popular games, and adding them into educational modules. Extending from this notion, it has been found that capture the flag (CTF) style competitions are a successful way to introduce students to a variety of technical concepts within the standard computer science curriculum. During the 2015 summer, a CTF was run at several GenCyber camps across the country with the primary goal of introducing high school students to various computer security and digital forensics topics without requiring that the students have any background in these topics. We found that this method of breaking down concepts into singular challenges, and tying these challenges together in a competitive environment was widely successful at not only introducing students to these concepts, but also motivating continued learning after the camps ended. This paper will analyze both the successes of the effort as well as the limitations discovered through using this technique.