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Research and Practice of Delivering Tabletop Exercises

Published: 03 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Tabletop exercises are used to train personnel in the efficient mitigation and resolution of incidents. They are applied in practice to support the preparedness of organizations and to highlight inefficient processes. Since tabletop exercises train competencies required in the workplace, they have been introduced into computing courses at universities as an innovation, especially within cybersecurity curricula. To help computing educators adopt this innovative method, we survey academic publications that deal with tabletop exercises. From 140 papers we identified and examined, we selected 14 papers for a detailed review. The results show that the existing research deals predominantly with exercises that follow a linear format and exercises that do not systematically collect data about trainees' learning. Computing education researchers can investigate novel approaches to instruction and assessment in the context of tabletop exercises to maximize the impact of this teaching method. Due to the relatively low number of published papers, the potential for future research is immense. Our review provides researchers, tool developers, and educators with an orientation in the area, a synthesis of trends, and implications for further work.

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  • (2024)Building the Urban Organizational Capability for Resilience as a Matter of Updating Security Education of CommunityInternational conference KNOWLEDGE-BASED ORGANIZATION10.2478/kbo-2024-002830:1(201-207)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2024
  • (2024)From Paper to Platform: Evolution of a Novel Learning Environment for Tabletop ExercisesProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653639(213-219)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1
July 2024
776 pages
ISBN:9798400706004
DOI:10.1145/3649217
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 03 July 2024

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Author Tags

  1. cybersecurity
  2. experiential learning
  3. hands-on training
  4. incident response
  5. systematic literature review
  6. tabletop exercise

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  • Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic

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  • (2024)Building the Urban Organizational Capability for Resilience as a Matter of Updating Security Education of CommunityInternational conference KNOWLEDGE-BASED ORGANIZATION10.2478/kbo-2024-002830:1(201-207)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2024
  • (2024)From Paper to Platform: Evolution of a Novel Learning Environment for Tabletop ExercisesProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653639(213-219)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024

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