1 Security education and awareness for K-6 going mobile Filippos Giannakas * , Georgios Kambourakis, Andreas Papasalouros ‡ , and Stefanos Gritzalis * Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece Email: fgiannakas@aegean.gr, gkamb@aegean.gr, sgritz@aegean.gr ‡ Department of Mathematics, University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece Email: andpapas@aegean.gr Abstract—Nowadays, due to the widespread participation of elementary school children in cyberspace activities, basic cyber- security education and awareness is deemed necessary. Within this context, knowledge acquisition in this timely and important field has greater chances to be more fruitful when the learner is properly motivated. Also, it is anticipated to be more joyful when knowledge is acquired in the form of a digital game-based activity. The paper at hand discusses the development of a novel mobile app called CyberAware, destined to cybersecurity education and awareness. At present, the game is designed for K-6 children in order to support either or both formal or informal learning. Additionally, due to its mobile characteristics, the game can be experienced as an outdoor or classroom activity. Finally, opposite to similar studies found in the literature so far, our attention is not solely drawn to game’s technological aspects but equally to the educational factor. This is achieved through the consideration and use of the ARCS motivational model already from the game’s design phase. Keywords—Security education and awareness; mDGBL; motiva- tion, ARCS. Note: This work is based in part on a paper presented at the IMCL 2015, The 9th International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication, Technologies and Learning [1]. I. I NTRODUCTION It is rather undisputed that Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) makes learning more attractive, motivating and per- sonalized from the learner’s viewpoint. Additionally, this type of games intend to improve and enhance, in a playful and enjoyable manner, some specific aspects of learning and can be met in every level of education. As such, it has been applied to numerous science education fields and curricula, more lately to cybersecurity education and awareness, which is the topic of this paper. Lately, with the advances in mobile computing, the positive outcomes of DGBL become even more reachable in the form of mobile DGBL (mDGBL). In this direction, when creating interactive learning contexts in a mDGBL app, there is a prominent need to identify the highly motivated aspects of a game. In literature, this can be promoted by specific “design patterns”. A Game Design Pattern (GDP) [2] is a method of codifying the knowledge that describes the design of game elements related to interaction. Within the context of m-Learning, the work [3] systematically reviews the GDPs for mobile platforms. A GDP pattern that is primarily well-suited to mobile platforms is that of “Quick Games”, which in literature is also known as mini-games. These are considered as quick session games that can also be played casually and on-the-go. Under this mindset, the mobile app described in this paper follows the aforementioned strategy and embeds a number of mini-games in order to provide burst- knowledge experience to the learners. Being a multidisciplinary challenge, the creation of a truly effective mDGBL platform or app for science education is far from being trivial; technological advances and facilities should be seen and faced in conjunction with the human player in order to maximize their payoffs. Moreover, the right blending of learning theories in a (serious) game’s storyline is decisive yet often neglected by designers. In some cases, this omission may be due to the undisputed difficulties designers face in applying the discrete stages of a learning theory directly to the app in a way it fulfills specific learning outcomes. Last but not least, seeing this issue from a Bring Your Own Device (BOYD) point of view, there is a need for such apps to work on arbitrary mobile devices and platforms. This is certain to not only overcome several mobile platform peculiarities, but to also increase learning independency and augment the anywhere, anytime learning experience. Our contribution: Motivated by the aforementioned issues, the paper at hand discusses the development of a novel mDGBL app called CyberAware destined to cybersecurity education and awareness. Among others, the topics consid- ered by CyberAware include: firewall technologies, antivirus software, security patches and updates, and email spam filters. Contrary to other works in the literature, our contribution is not solely focused on technical aspects but on the pedagogical factor as well. Thus, the design of the game is based on the Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction (ARCS) motivational model [4]. At present, CyberAware is designed for K-6 educators and can be used to support either or both formal or informal learning exercised as an outdoor or indoor activity. The game prototype is developed using standard software tools, including Android Development Kit (ADK) and the open-source libGDX game engine [5]. A preliminary evaluation of the game app is also performed using both pre- and post-questionnaires. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next DRAFT