Enhancing Teaching Methods in FreeBSD Education through Chaos Engineering and Gamification
Over the past few years, I have observed that the misuse of AI in education for cheating purposes has created significant challenges in assessing students' authentic contributions. Another issue I identified is that university labs rarely teach the kind of problem-solving skills that are relevant in real-world scenarios — the kinds of problems graduates will face in their professional lives, such as fixing production issues. Traditional assignments often lacked real-world relevance and, because they could easily be solved with AI assistance, left students unprepared for professional challenges.
To address these shortcomings, I developed — as part of my master’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany — a new teaching framework that leverages Chaos Engineering and Gamification to modernize Unix education on FreeBSD. With my new system, instructors can simulate realistic problems that students must solve using system administrator permissions. I also designed the framework to make it difficult for participants to “cheat” using AI, and I evaluated its effectiveness through a controlled test with a group of students.
In my presentation, I introduce this “Chaos Education System”, which I tested in the Unix for Software Developers course at the university. The name is inspired by the concept of chaos monkey systems, which intentionally “wreak havoc” on production systems to improve their resiliency and train system administrators to diagnose and repair failures. My approach enables instructors to inject intentional faults (error scenarios) into student-managed FreeBSD jails. The students must then identify, resolve, and prevent these issues from recurring using standard system administration tools — including full root permissions.
To increase student motivation and simulate real-world “production pressure,” I implemented a global highscore list as a gamification element. Each time an issue is solved, the system awards points based on elapsed time and an instructor-defined difficulty bonus. After each exercise, a post-mortem group discussion allows students to share their solution approaches, compare methodologies, and reflect on lessons learned. Through this process, students gain valuable practical skills such as troubleshooting, system recovery, and proactive system management — all within a realistic and dynamic environment that traditional “one-size-fits-all” assignments fail to provide.
I built the entire system using BSD-licensed open-source components, including FreeBSD, pf, VNET, Bastille jails, and templates. Shell scripts act as the glue, connecting these technologies and implementing the logic for the chaos monkey framework. I tested the prototype with two groups of 16 students each in January 2025. One group was allowed to use ChatGPT during the exercises to assess whether AI assistance improved their performance (if at all). Insights from this testing were used to refine and enhance the system further.
In my talk, I will present the concept and implementation of the Chaos Education System, demonstrate its functionality, and discuss potential future developments. FreeBSD has proven to be an outstanding foundation for this project due to its modularity, open-source availability, low resource consumption, and excellent documentation. I believe the system can be expanded beyond academic use — for example, in corporate training or workshop-style events. It allows instructors or trainers to easily create and deploy custom scenarios, scaling efficiently to multiple parallel users thanks to the lightweight nature of FreeBSD jails.
Audience: This project is aimed at educators, trainers, and system administrators interested in modernizing Unix/Linux education through hands-on, interactive methods. Managers and team leads may also find the system useful for training employees through customized scenarios that replicate their own production environments.