Additional information
by Pamela Cosman (Author)
When Sara and Daniel's teacher implements electronic Bin Coin rewards for collecting trash and recycling, the kids start using this digital currency to buy and sell. Their developing system for keeping track of accounts brings in concepts from the world of cryptocurrency such as mining a block (recording trades that have been validated), a cryptographic nonce (a number used only once), a mempool (the memory pool for storing trades not yet validated) and a double spend attack . But then Sara and Daniel face a series of mysteries and crises: Why is this small kid paying BinCoin to the class bully in such oddly specific amounts? Can knowledge of the school's digital currency help restore a man's life savings using a real cryptocurrency? And during a visit from the State Board of Education, who pulled the fire alarm before the block could be mined?
Author Biography
Pamela Cosman was raised in Los Angeles with three older brothers, with whom she discovered a love for all things engineering and science. She is the author of T he Secret Code Menace and The Hexagon Clue, Middle Grade fiction books on coding and its unexpected uses. She also wrote Free to Choose STEM, an advice book for teens. When she's not thinking about her next book, or playing Codenames with her husband and four sons, she teaches electrical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Recently she's been using eye-tracking glasses to figure out what people are looking at, and also finding better ways to transmit video underwater.
