Designing and Using Capture The Flag for Coordination and Interaction in Engineering Education

Capture the Flag (CTF) games improve learners’ engagement and diversify pedagogy for education and training. We design and build a novel CTF game that includes coordination and interaction between the (virtually participating) participants to build fellowship and facilitate networking. Our work builds on the existing CTF components with educational benefits but differs from the traditional CTF approach which presents either an individual game with no participant interaction or a team-based game where the members already know each other and have formed teams. More specifically, we incorporate real-time interactions between participants who are new to each other and engage the participants to collectively solve the CTF challenges. We apply our CTF in both a cybersecurity scholarship program and an academic conference. This paper describes and explains the design, implementation, execution, and validation of our CTF, particularly focusing on the novel goal of including coordination and interaction in order to build fellowships with the participants. We validate our CTF design and build using multiple channels, including the real-time data provided by logging during the session, post-CTF survey, and interviews from the beta-testing session. Our evaluation results show that our novel CTF focusing on coordination and interaction aids in building fellowship and a collaborative environment. We envision our CTF design to help with the rapport building and collaboration among participants in classroom/course settings, workshops, conferences, or technical training sessions.