This presentation will share the conceptual framework for a new resource under development for the CAE Community: a competitions roadmap. The goal for the roadmap is to move beyond a traditional list and visually render everything CAE faculty and students need to know about the competitions available to enable selection of the most appropriate competition for them. This presentation will share a prototype and solicit ideas and input for the first production release.

This presentation describes how the team of Strayer University student coders won 5th place out of over 400 participating schools in the 2022 NSA Codebreaker Challenge, a hyper-authentic learning experience in which teams from across the country compete to develop successful defenses to real-time cybersecurity threats. Lessons are drawn into how students from non-traditional and underserved communities can overcome key challenges to developing the coding, engineering, strategic planning, and problem-solving skillsets needed for today’s IT workplace.

Audience engagement is a key challenge associated with Cybersecurity education. Gamification - where elements of competition, unpredictability, and active participation are leveraged to increase interest and motivate learner engagement - is a new frontier for academic research and investment. In this presentation, we demonstrate how a gamified “virtual escape room” challenge can be used to create an interesting, exciting, and memorable cybersecurity learning experience.