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During a recent parent resource day at her eldest son’s second-grade classroom, Professor Pamela Cosman from the University of California, San Diego, introduced a topic typically reserved for advanced engineering students: error-correcting codes. She explained how these codes ensure that confidential messages reach their intended recipients. The children were so engaged that they opted to spend their lunch break working on activities related to encoding and decoding.
“They viewed it as a game,” Cosman, who leads the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is affiliated with the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI), remarked. “It was fantastic. I thought, ‘I want to harness that excitement and turn it into a storybook.’”
Fast forward over twenty years, and that initial experience has developed into a collection of adventure novels for children, seamlessly integrating complex technical concepts into thrilling narratives. Her latest release, The Crypto Campaign, introduces young audiences to the fundamentals of cryptocurrency through a fictional coin named “BinCoin,” which is designed to motivate students to engage in recycling and trash collection.
As this new currency gains popularity among the students and they begin exchanging their coins, unexpected challenges arise, necessitating clever solutions. The young protagonists face issues with record-keeping, security, and fraud—similar to real-world concerns encountered by cryptocurrency developers. These challenges help readers grasp concepts such as decentralized networks and blockchain technology.
Gossip Protocol and Beyond
Some technical ideas in the book were influenced by Cosman’s second son, who is now a cryptocurrency and AI entrepreneur. Although these subjects aren’t part of her own curriculum, which focuses on digital image processing, Cosman draws upon her extensive teaching experience at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. She also mentors students through initiatives like QI’s Neurodiversity in Tech internship, using this background to determine which concepts to present, their sequence, and the examples to use.
In The Crypto Campaign, each new obstacle in the storyline serves as a chance for characters—and readers—to learn more about the underlying technology. For example, when students record BinCoin transactions in their notebooks, they share updates with one another whenever they meet, illustrating the “gossip protocol” that disseminates information across cryptocurrency networks.
Cosman emphasized her desire for the book to serve as “an enjoyable fiction tale for readers seeking entertainment.” For those looking to delve deeper, a nonfiction section at the end of the book provides additional insights into the technology and alerts readers to various scams.
“I don’t intend this to be an invitation for novices to dive headfirst into the cryptocurrency market,” she clarified. “The goal of the book is to explain technical concepts.”