What are we teaching in cyber competitions?

Student competitions are widespread across all academic disciplines, and are often touted as a means to motivate and educate students. Competitions may be internal within a single class or course, or vie school against school as regional, national, or international competitions and exist at all levels including 9-12 grades. These competitions have different formats and focuses such as vulnerability assessments, forensic challenges, offensive, and defensive competitions (or a combination of these). Some competitions require simple scripts and are considered ideal for script kitties while others require in-depth understanding of computer security and networking techniques to successfully compete in the competition. While the number of competitions and students participating in them have increased, it is unclear whether the stated academic goals of the competition are being met. In some cases, it appears that the focus of the student and institutional effort is more on the competition itself than on learning underlying concepts and developing skills. At our institution, students participate in several cyber-competitions, some of which we have initiated. The purpose of this paper is to survey existing cybercompetitions to understand the purpose of the competition, review underlying stated educational goals, and explore how the competition meets these goals. We compare the role of cyber competitions with the role of other computer-related competitions such as robotics, programming, unmanned aerial vehicles, and artificial intelligence comparing and contrasting the educational impact of the competitions on the participants.