Work-in-Progress-Participatory Design of an Augmented Reality Firewall Game

To ensure children’s online safety in response to cyber threats, such as hacking, phishing, and misinformation, children must learn about cybersecurity. Through an iterative design process in collaboration with middle school teachers, we developed an Augmented Reality (AR) firewall game for middle school students (aged 10-14 years) to familiarize them with cybersecurity fundamentals. The iterative design process consisted of a series of design sprints in which the teachers detailed how they teach cybersecurity in the classroom and discussed the design choices of a firewall game. Through this process, we developed an AR game to teach about firewalls that teachers feel is suitable for classroom use and capable of making cybersecurity education concrete and interactive. This work-in-progress paper presents the AR firewall game's iterative design and initial prototype. Future work will explore the cybersecurity knowledge students develop from using this gamified platform and potential games of other cybersecurity concepts.