Building a Better Podcast Assignment

I’m excited to share that my cryptography students and I will launch the third season of our class podcast, *[One-Time Pod](https://derekbruff.org/blogs/fywscrypto/historical-crypto/one-time-pod/)*, this fall. A few years ago, thanks to some work with a Center for Teaching learning community on teaching with podcasts, I decided to replace one of the paper assignments in my first-year writing seminar with an audio assignment. Students were asked to take a code or cipher from history and describe its origin, use, influence, and mechanics. The assignment has both a storytelling component, in which students use the audio format to construct a narrative about their chosen code or cipher, and a technical communication component, since they’re asked to explain their code or cipher’s encryption and decryption using nothing but sound.