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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…