Play to Protect: Evaluating Cyber Threat Defender in South African Cybersecurity Education

Cyber Threat Defender, a strategy-based card game designed to teach cybersecurity concepts, was evaluated across second-year and final-year BSc IT students at a South African university to assess its perceived educational value and suitability for curricular integration. Both cohorts rated the game highly for learning value, engagement, and adoption within coursework, and final-year students reported somewhat stronger alignment between gameplay mechanics and core cybersecurity ideas. These findings reflect student perceptions gathered in a non-randomised, observational classroom setting, so they indicate associations rather than established learning gains or causal effects.

The most consistent finding concerns the role of instructional clarity. A rule-limited control condition produced markedly lower usability ratings than a facilitated playtest, underscoring that structured onboarding is central to effective classroom implementation. Rule clarity appeared to shape how easily students could engage with the game, yet it did not substantially diminish their perception of its educational worth, suggesting that the underlying design retains meaningful pedagogical potential even when delivery is imperfect. Most cross-cohort differences were minor and largely non-significant after multiplicity adjustment, with the notable exception of second-year students rating repeated play as clarifying concepts more strongly.

Qualitative analysis points to five interpretive dimensions: conceptual mapping, strategic reasoning, rule clarity, collaboration, and the need for stronger local contextualisation. Students valued the game's collaborative character and its capacity to prompt strategic thinking, while also identifying opportunities to ground scenarios more closely in the South African threat and institutional environment. The study's scope is limited to a single university, two cohorts, and self-reported measures, which positions it as an exploratory foundation for future controlled evaluations of actual learning outcomes.