As you might already know, the folks at Raytheon Technologies (RTX) are using their Capture The Flag Jeopardy as a capstone assessment for some of their cybersecurity-themed internal training courses. But why use a CTF? Why not just test the students the traditional way? To answer some of these questions, we did some digging to figure out what benefits a CTF could provide as a learning device. 

The obvious benefit of a CTF as a learning tool is that it requires students to be engaged in what they’re doing. Having more interaction than a standard paper test allows the students to feel more invested in their learning process. This does present a couple of issues to keep in mind, however. 

Firstly there’s the issue of competition. The competitive nature of a CTF environment is something that could discourage new learners. Less confidence in one’s own abilities could prevent people from even trying at all, which would be a big problem for a learning device to have. Luckily, there are some solutions to this problem. Having a team-based approach lets new learners rely on more experienced teammates for guidance while still being able to contribute their fair share. To go further on this, providing hints and analytics to users has been found to be a good means of encouraging less-experienced users to participate. 

The second problem is that of engagement. How do we make learning interesting and fun? As it turns out, making a game out of the process is the way to go. More interactivity, personalization, and other game elements significantly increase the entertainment value of a learning device, and with that comes an increase in user engagement and success. To elaborate a little further, providing points to users for completing challenges and allowing users to spend these points on hints is an example of in-game economics that provide a sense of strategy to the learning experience. Lastly, game balance is a solid means of increasing engagement for those aforementioned early learners. Being able to provide easier questions for those users and harder questions for more-experienced learners is key.