Teaching Engineering students to "Think thief"

We report on an educational experiment where information technology students were encouraged to think out of the box about the dark side of information technology. Instead of taking the usual point of view of the engineer we challenged the students to take the point of view of the motivated offender. After teaching the course three years, we report on the exciting ideas our students came up with, and on the lessons we learned in designing and teaching the course. The main conclusions are (a) thinking thief inspires students to design creative projects, (b) working with real subjects creates a powerful learning experience, and (c) students are struggling with methodological issues.

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