Thanks to researchers at the University of Missouri, neurodivergent individuals who want to learn about cybersecurity can soon trade in their pencil and paper for a pair of virtual reality (VR) goggles and a good time.
USucceed, a VR platform that looks to prepare neurodivergent learners for a career in cybersecurity through a gamified experience, is in early stages of development. The platform, which has received roughly $850,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation, is currently being developed for Meta Quest headsets and will be released as open-source software.
So, what is it anyways? University of Missouri’s Noah Glaser and Prasad Calyam, who have been working on the platform for the past 10 months, told IT Brew that users who play USucceed will be tasked with solving escape room-like challenges that increase in complexity around cybersecurity concepts in a “futuristic space lab” setting.
“If you’ve seen an episode of Black Mirror, you have this scene with a bunch of arrays of servers,” Glaser said. “It’s kind of like that, but without the spooky undertone.”
For example, the researchers said, USucceed users may find themselves tasked with putting a halt to a distributed denial-of-service attack by completing a variety of interactive activities including scanning systems for malicious files and searching through IP addresses.
Glaser and Calyam told IT Brew that they have started to do user testing on neurodiverse individuals for USucceed and are in the process of building out different levels for the platform, which will be released as they are finished.
Dose of (virtual) reality. Glaser, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, told IT Brew that the research team opted to use VR as a vector for teaching because of its ability to create tailored experiences for users.
“What’s great about these immersive spaces is that we can control and manipulate an infinite amount of variables,” Glaser said. “So, if one individual is extra prone to overstimulation from stimuli, we can adapt [to] that.”
Calyam, who is the director of the Cyber Education, Research, and Infrastructure Center at the university, added that VR creates an accessible learning environment for neurodivergent individuals who find physical interactions challenging.
“In the avatar, they are more comfortable representing themselves or interacting and it gives us the ability to make mistakes without hurting people,” he said.
Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Along with a customized learning experience, USucceed will support its users with the help of Robi, an AI-based pedagogical agent that acts as an “encyclopedia” for cybersecurity knowledge.
“If they’re stuck, they can press a button, almost like they’re using Siri on [their] phone,” Glaser said.
Breaking barriers. An estimated 15–20% of the US population is neurodivergent, an umbrella term that includes conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia. The researchers told IT Brew that the USucceed project intends to provide a pathway for a community that is often overlooked into an in-demand career path.
“Cybersecurity is more important than ever before but individuals with disabilities are oftentimes left out of these conversations and face higher unemployment rates even though there’s great paying jobs that fit their skill sets really well,” Glaser said. “The goal of this project is to provide those training and give them workforce opportunities so they can keep pace and gain access to some of these opportunities.”
And USucceed is not only for neurodiverse individuals, but also built by them. The researchers told IT Brew that they have collaborated with individuals from several of the university’s post-secondary programs tailored toward the neurodivergent communities—including Self-Determined Transition Readiness Through Individual Vocational Experiences (STRIVE), an employment skills program for young adults with autism and similar diagnoses—to work alongside them on the platform.
“In the spring of this year, we had two individuals from STRIVE come in and they had never worked in Unity,” Glaser said, adding that the individuals became fluent in the programming language by the end of the semester and created code and 3D design elements that are featured on the platform.
Calyam told IT Brew that he anticipates the project—which he says is called USucceed because of its purpose of helping students excel in cybersecurity careers—will have a much larger impact than anticipated.
“This initiative that we’re doing is going to become part of a much larger initiative that we hope to now go after to solve many related problems and build a…larger capacity for this kind of research,” he said.