See the latest updates and releases across CyberStart’s Groups, the Field Manual and challenges for 2023.
Explore all updates and refinements requested by CyberStart players.
Throughout 2023, we’ve been working behind the scenes in collaboration with educators and players to bring new features and updates that you want to see in CyberStart.
From providing clearer learning outcomes and improved onboarding for students, to refined classroom tracking and assistance for educators, there’s something to make learning and teaching cyber security with CyberStart a better experience for everyone!
Keep reading to take a first look at all the new updates and features you can expect to find across CyberStart’s Groups, the Field Manual and challenges.
Get more from Groups with new tools to monitor and track your students
We strive to improve educators’ experiences when engaging and tracking student progress in CyberStart. That’s why we’re adding new tools and refinements to the Groups feature to help monitor and assist your students with ease as they learn cyber security in CyberStart!
What’s new in Groups?
The new tools in Groups will make it easier to do everything from quickly identifying who is the most and least engaged to creating timed competitions.
By mid-October 2023, when all of these updates have been released, you’ll be able to:
- See a detailed breakdown of your Group members’ progress across each CyberStart base.
- Explore each Group members’ points and challenge progress across a specified time.
- Get more insights into how your Group members play by seeing when they attempt a challenge, access the Field Manual and more.
- See when your Group members last engaged with CyberStart at a glance.
- Sort your Group members by their number of completed challenges and points in ascending or descending order.
- Easily identify when your Group members are most and least active over a specific time frame.
- Sort your Group members by their progress.
- View your Group members’ ‘activity’, ‘completed challenges’, and ‘points’ across your chosen time range.
These tools in Groups will help you set goals in your class or club and gain more insights into your students’ progress as they learn with CyberStart.
A deeper look into the Groups update is coming to CyberStart’s blog soon, so keep an eye out!
Make your students’ onboarding process into CyberStart easier with new and updated challenges in Intern base
We’ve made some significant updates to certain challenges in Intern base to allow more players to find their feet and gain confidence when learning new cyber security skills.
What’s new in Intern base?
Update to Lazy Locked Login (L01 C04):
The Lazy Locked Login challenge is often the first time players are introduced to developer tools in CyberStart, and where we began to see a drop-off in people completing the Intern base challenges.
While you’ll still learn how to use developer tools in this challenge, the brief, look and navigation have been updated to give students more guidance when learning this new skill.
We hope the update to Lazy Locked Login will allow more of your students to solve this challenge and gain confidence in using developer tools for the first time!
All challenges have been replaced in Intern base Level 2:
Over the last 12 months, all challenges in Intern base Level 2 have been replaced with new challenges to give players a gentler onboarding experience when getting to grips with beginner cyber security concepts.
Level 2 of Intern base now follows a whole new storyline in space, where players must help launch a satellite and investigate mysterious messages using fundamental cyber security skills like coding commands and decryption.
You can learn more about the changes to Intern base, along with a full rundown of the new challenges in our Intern base updates blog here.
Get better support from the Field Manual when solving challenges
We’ve made it quicker and easier than ever to find useful information in the Field Manual that will support you and your students when solving CyberStart’s challenges!
What’s new in the Field Manual?
Players now have immediate access to the Field Manual content that’s most relevant to the challenge they’re working on within the challenge itself.
Every challenge that has a relevant Field Manual write-up or walkthrough will now show a “Related Field Manual Content” section where you can quickly access the information you need to solve the challenge.
This update will allow players to quickly access the most useful Field Manual content for the challenge they’re trying to solve in CyberStart.
Discover more Field Manual updates we’ve made in 2023
- Updates to walkthroughs, including the addition of a “Real World Uses” section in all walkthroughs that provides real-world context to the challenges.
- Made the Field Manual link more noticeable on the challenge page, to remind you of the useful information you can find there to help you solve challenges.
- Highlighted when a challenge hint costs nothing to use, either because the hint itself is free or because you’ve already paid points for it, so you always know which hints are available to you without any point cost.
- Added a Forensics chapter, comprised of 20 additional pages of content.
- Introduced major updates throughout the Field Manual text to bring it more in line with the video content.
These Field Manual updates will make it easier for you and your students to find the relevant information you need to solve CyberStart’s challenges and learn more in-demand cyber security skills.
Explore all the Field Manual updates we made in 2023 here.
See which skills you’ve learnt in each challenge with Learning Outcomes
Recently, we asked CyberStart players what they wanted to see upon completing a challenge.
Many newcomers to learning cyber security requested a way to understand what skills they were levelling up in each CyberStart challenge.
From this feedback, we’ve developed a new Learning Outcomes feature, where players can see which skills they’ve demonstrated after solving any one of CyberStart’s challenges.
We hope the Learning Outcomes feature will help give you and your students a better insight into which cyber security skills they’re building as they play CyberStart!
Take a deeper dive into this new feature in our Learning Outcomes blog here.
All these exciting updates will be completed by mid-October 2023, but you may be able to explore some of them sooner if you are eligible for one of our free programmes. Check your eligibility for our free programmes here or with the information below.
