Engineering a Good Story: UC San Diego Professor Introduces Kids to Crypto Tech Through Fiction

When University of California San Diego Professor Pamela Cosman visited her oldest son’s second-grade classroom as part of a parent resource day, she introduced a concept normally taught in college engineering courses — error-correcting codes — as a way of making sure secret messages were passed on as intended. The children were so enthusiastic they chose to spend their lunchtime on encoding and decoding worksheets.

They were thinking of it as a game,” said Cosman, who chairs the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is a UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI) affiliate. “That was so cool. I thought, ‘I want to try to harness that and write a storybook.’”

More than two decades later, that experience has grown into a series of children's adventure novels that weave technical concepts into stories of mystery and suspense. Cosman's latest, The Crypto Campaign, introduces young readers to the concepts behind cryptocurrency through a fictional currency, “BinCoin,” invented to encourage students to collect trash and recycling.