2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

For more than a decade, game-like elements such as point scoring, leaderboards, competition, challenges, and collaboration have been incorporated into fields far beyond gaming and technology. This practice, known as gamification, has been shown to improve customer satisfaction, user activity, social interaction, content retention, and motivation across domains ranging from marketing and commerce to health, innovation, and education.

In this paper, we present the results of integrating these gamification elements into a cybersecurity course taken by over 100 sophomore to senior Computer Science and Cyber Engineering students at our institution. While individual elements—such as competition and collaboration—have been studied extensively in other contexts, our work examines their impact on a student population already familiar with gamification and provides insights into their educational experiences.

Our findings indicate that gamification makes the study of cybersecurity more engaging and rewarding, and when well designed can have a significantly positive impact on students' ability to collaborate. Moreover, we identify which specific elements are most effective in achieving student engagement and which elements contribute to student stress and pressure. Notably, our findings show that the gamification elements that heighten student pressure often are the same elements that sustain engagement. These results suggest that well-designed gamification is a viable approach for increasing student engagement and content retention in technical education, both within and beyond Computer Science.