Leveraging Our Quantum Mechanical Advantage

I attended the Organization of American States' Regional Initiative for Cybersecurity Education & Training (RICET2025) in beautiful Montevideo, Uruguay last month and was surprised to hear everyone there describing quantum technologies as the next big thing. This is typically how quantum is described, but hearing this from digital professionals was a bit of a shock considering most of what constitutes digital is based on quantum mechanics.

On the plane ride(s) home I took a swing at describing the incredible quantum evolution our electronics have taken using the transistors as the guidepost.

Leveraging Our Quantum Mechanical Advantage

A look at the transistors you're surrounded by and how they have led us into the quantum realm!

It’s the 100^th anniversary of the discovery of quantum mechanics in 2025. The UN is celebrating it with the International Year of Quantum, yet many seem to think quantum engineering is the next big thing rather than what has enabled digital technology to become our revolutionary communications medium. Every digital device you use and many other common technologies leverage quantum mechanics in some way. We wouldn’t have smartphones, microwaves, space-based (ie: laser) communication, GPS, or numerous other everyday technologies without quantum mechanics.

Carl Sagan’s famous quote came to mind a few weeks ago while I was on another cybersecurity panel in front of about a thousand years of I.T. experience in Alberta. When I asked the room, who couldn’t stop flexing their digital knowhow, to name any quantum devices operating in the room there was a deafening silence. From the laser enhanced digital projector to the trillions of transistors operating in that room and the gigabytes of solid-state memory storing data, it's hard to believe that none of the IT pros in there had a clue about their quantum underpinnings.

This includes the IT professionals who make it all work.

In 1925 a breakthrough happened. Up until then we were happily working with Newtonian mechanics, and it did a fantastic job of telling us when eclipses were going to happen or how to build rudimentary steam engines, but as our instruments improved we began to see problems with Newton’s causal universe. Where we thought of even the smallest things as tiny versions of our own predictable solar system, we suddenly found ourselves looking at particles and wondering why they seemed to sometimes act like waves. In fact, the closer we looked, the more it seemed that the world we knew was an illusion largely based on our scale.

I consider myself a technician turned teacher, so I can honestly say that the details of the science aren’t front of mind for me, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know what our best guesses are about how reality works, especially when it predicates the digital technology I teach. I’m hoping you feel the same way after reading this.

I’m probably going to maul it, but in the interest of understanding the quantum mechanical advantage that we’re leveraging all around us, I’ll start with the fundamentals and focus something we're surrounded by: transistors. You're using billions of them right now to read this.

In the early Twentieth Century we were working with vacuum tubes to control electricity flow. Early computers like Colossus used these clunky devices that allowed us electronic control of electrons for computation and it worked well enough to decipher Nazi Enigma codes. To give you an idea of the size and efficiency of this technology, if we were to somehow to build a vacuum tube iPhone equivalent to current ones with nearly twenty billion transistors in them, it would have to be bigger than Sweden and would use more energy than the entire human race generates!

Figure 1 an impossible vacuum tube iPhone equivalent would be bigger than Sweden and use more electricity than humanity generates, just to be an iPhone!

But things were about to get smaller and more efficient. It’s this transistor evolution I want to take you on a journey through as it has been happening throughout your lifetime and is the reason you’re surrounded with all this baffling digital technology. Transistor evolution also brought us to quantum scales of engineering in less than 75 years and has been leveraging quantum mechanics to work since the end of the 20th Century.

Shortly after the war (in 1947) Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented the first transistor at Bell Labs using germanium and they were the size of a small matchbox. It was a huge step forward. Comparing it to the orbital Swedish vacuum tube iPhone mentioned before, one built with these early transistors (which you could comfortably hold in your hand) would have to be bigger than a city block and over fifty stories tall!

Figure 2 a 1947 iPhone using the first germanium transistors would be bigger than a city block!

When we discover something new like transistors we tend to pile on, trying different materials to see what works best. What we discovered in the early sixties was that silicon had excellent properties when it came to letting charge through tiny, engineered gaps, but we didn’t stop at silicon. In another material science breakthrough we discovered that oxide coatings allowed us to shrink things down to molecule thin layers, which led to Intel’s breakthrough in the 1970s with the first microprocessors and integrated circuits containing millions of transistors all in a silicon substrate. Now you know why Silicon Valley isn't called Germanium Valley.

At this point we weren’t harnessing quantum effects, but an understanding of quantum mechanics was necessary to enable us to create quantum aligned designs. This early nanotechnology engineering also confirmed that our quantum mechanical theories were correct and pushed us further. This is a good example of how science drives technology which drives more science and so on.

The problem with our rapid miniaturization was that we were starting to approach classical (Newtonian) limits where electrons were leaking in strange quantum ways, which happens when you’ve got barriers only a few molecules wide. What might boggle your mind is that we were there in the late 1970s and '80s!

Once we hit this classical limit engineers began intentionally designing devices that leverage quantum mechanical behavior, like high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) with quantum wells that confine electrons in 2d structures. It was said on the Uruguayan panel that we don’t have a good grasp of quantum mechanics, but we were building devices that leveraged quantum effects in the 1990s! It’s our lack of awareness around our rapid technological evolution that creates these inaccurate 'quantum is the next big thing' headlines. If we recognized the quantum devices around us, what's coming next wouldn't be such a shock.

The latest smartphones can have upwards of twenty billion metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) which leverage quantum effects to run more efficiently and at smaller scales than classical transistors ever could; this is quantum engineering in action and you likely have it in your hand.

We’ve considered orbiting Sweden sized vacuum tube iPhones, and first transistor city block sized iPhones. If our imaginary old-tech iPhone was built using the last classical transistors from the 1970s it would be the size of a skyscraper. We’ve plumbed the quantum depths exploiting the strange effects we find there to miniaturize things down to the device in your hand. We have a pretty good grip on quantum. It's been the next big thing for the past fifty years.

Figure 3 The thing in your hand that you can't live without is a wonder of quantum engineering and a key driver of the modern digital world

Field effect transistors are the foundation of our current electronics, but once again we’re running up against the problem of managing electron flow at incredibly small, quantum scales. I was told at the conference I’m flying back from as I write this that we’re at the end of Moore’s Law and there is nowhere else to go, but that’s classical thinking. Moore’s Law was defined in the age of classical scaling, but quantum engineering gives us new paths for advancing digital technology beyond traditional limits.

When you’re working at scales this small, electrons can tunnel through energy barriers (even through solid objects) because at quantum scales things don’t act causally like they do up here. Researchers are working on leveraging these processes to create tunneling field effect transistors that, instead of pushing electrons over an energy barrier to open a transistor, use quantum tunnelling to pass right through, one electron at a time. In my mind this is like the difference between a steam engine and a modern Formula One car in terms of efficiency and yes, this means your electronics are about to get smaller, more energy efficient and faster once again.

Don’t assume we’ve stopped there. We're not just throwing material sciences at these quantum engineering challenges these days but considering how we might use entanglement, superposition and quantum teleportation to our advantage. These days graphene electrodes are being used to manipulate electron wave coherence creating single-molecule and quantum interference transistors. That’s a mouthful (I had to write it out then check it twice), but this represents yet another step in our ability to engineer at quantum levels because we're starting to use the wave like nature of electrons to produce desired outcomes. Quantum mechanics and the technology that springs from it needs to be recognized or else we’re left looking like confused monkeys confounded by the digital devices we spend our lives looking at.

This research on quantum interference transistors suggests even more efficient future possibilities. Meanwhile you can buy spintronics right now that rely on the manipulation of the spin state of electrons (an inherently quantum property) to store and manipulate information. The directions we will go in while advancing our engineering of quantum outcomes are fascinating to keep up with. Don't be afraid to make that effort.

We’re not only leveraging our quantum mechanical advantage in transistors. I picked them because they gave me a timeline to follow that you’ll be at least passingly familiar with. As mentioned at the outset, we wouldn’t have lasers, LEDs, MRIs, nuclear medicine, solid state memory and many other technologies you’re surrounded by if quantum mechanics hadn’t pointed us towards them. The only thing true about quantum being the next big thing is in quantum computing, which is wildly divergent from the digital devices looked at here and deserves its own space to unpack.

You are surrounded by quantum mechanical advantage. Celebrate this centenary of our discovery of quantum mechanics by recognizing that it isn't coming soon but is something you've been surrounded by your whole life. Hopefully this approach will give you the context you need to face a future that will only become more quantum.

We really should be teaching this in schools.Want to give it a try? Join us in making games that demystify quantum in this year's Student Quantum Arcade Game Jam:

IYQ2025 Quantum Arcade Game Jam Coming Fall, 2025!

 This fall, as part of this year's National CyberDay event, www.cyberday.ca, Canadian education students and youth in community groups will have an opportunity to explore quantum science and technology and design a game that could get published on UBC's www.quantumarcade.org!

Student gamedev and quantum awareness combine this fall into something new!

Email: digitaldash@ictc-ctic.ca with any questions!

Every Graduate In Canada is an Immigrant in their Own Country

"an image showing the effects of high youth
unemployment in canada showing angry
 young people from many fields of work in
front of a wilting maple leaf"

 The gap between education and work in Canada continues to grow. Many people are aware of the challenges immigrants face when trying to break into the Canadian job market, but young people, even those born here, face many of the same hurdles including in-built prejudices by the people hiring them.

A colleague recently told me her son cannot find a cybersecurity job even after finishing his college program in it. I've talked about cybersecurity a fair bit on Dusty World and it's a mess. Academia wanted its pound of flesh and so rebranded computer science courses as cybersecurity specializations and further muddied the water, but cyber is a an applied skill set, like policing, nursing or teaching. You can sit in a cloud and theorize about it as much as you like, but the work of it happens in the real world every day and a Ph.D. in it isn't the same as doing it. Yet requirements for entry level cyber jobs have become absurd with expectations of post-graduate degrees which do little to prepare a young person for the work itself any more than a masters in law would help a police officer work on the streets. This young man did everything right, studying cyber in an applied manner in college to fill a need Canada claims it has, and yet he finds himself out in the cold.

Last night I was at a mining industry event. Someone on our panel suggested that we could resolve the skills shortage by upskilling people local to the mines in Northern Ontario. This has the added benefit of them more likely sticking around because they're already home. They also aren't caught out by life in the north as those in Southern Ontario often are. Someone in the audience pushed back with the story of their son who grew up in Northern Ontario doing all the right things. He answered the call for skilled trades and became an apprentice electrician in hopes of working the local mines where money is good and he can stay close to home. His applications to all the mines in the area were summarily ignored. We often hear these skills-gap closing suggestions and they sound great when you're floating on a boat in Toronto harbour, but why isn't a kid in a high-demand skilled trade finding work in an industry that claims to be desperately short of young talent?

Youth unemployment (ages 18-24) remain at
over double what everyone else faces. It was
even worse during COVID.

Canadians are cliquey by nature, even when it comes to their own children. You hear constant bleating from industry about shortages in skilled trades and technology, yet we seem to go out of our way to find reasons not to hire our own young people.

In the past year I've worked with cybersecurity, manufacturing and mining organizations on engaging students with career possibilities. The promise is a high-demand, well paying job with future readiness baked in, yet when it comes to landing that job the people hiring seem to go out of their way to find reasons not to even acknowledge these applications let alone accept them.

I'd always assumed this was a failure of education, but the problem runs deeper than that. Perhaps it's Canada's colonial history. Do we have an ingrained belief that we don't have to develop talent or provide it with places to grow? Perhaps this is mixed up with our immigration policies. Why nurture local talent when you can cherry pick it from other countries? The next time I hear someone lamenting a 'brain drain' to another country I'll try not to snort. Trying to grow a career in Canada's stoney ground makes it less a brain drain and more of a brain runoff. Other countries aren't stealing our talent, we're rejecting it and they're taking what we throw away.

There is a lot of momentum in Canada right now to build an economy that can function internally with its own resources, but we're not going to build that economy unless we resolve our talent supply chain, and we're not going to resolve that widening school to work gap unless we not only build the programs to support our young people, but also change our minds and grow out of this colonialist mindset.

Whether it's a gap between post-secondary institutions and employers or some deeper cultural problem Canadians are prejudiced with, finding work in Canada remains far more difficult than it should be for our young people. Even when they follow all the advice from politicians and spend a lot of time and money training themselves in the high-demand careers everyone keeps telling them Canada so desperately needs, the opportunities seldom appear.

The advertising is one thing, the reality another.

Despite high unemployment, young people are being left behind this election

Reframing Digital Literacy: what it is and how to teach it

I did a research piece for Canadian School Libraries last winter that looked at how you might develop the complex, multi-disciplinary digital skills you find in cybersecurity in a relatively short period of time. When I first put it together I found myself spending a lot of the time at the front of the paper trying to define the digital skills we find ourselves lacking. I came to the conclusion that adopting high abstraction digital tools such as those you find in cyber, A.I. and other emerging technologies makes for an impossible leap when we don't have the basics in place.

How we've missed this in education is a good question. Anyone with a background in the field knows that there is no such thing as a 'digital native' and that this myth, which has caused so much damage as it prevents education from building meaningful digital pedagogy, kicked off what has become a multi-generational skills shortage that is doing real damage to both the economy and students' future prospects.

Digital technology has worked its way into everything in 2025, so being unable to make productive use of it damages our ability to compete in a digitally connected world. That we continue to hum and haw about what digital fluency is and how to build it suggests that we're not going to resolve this problem any time soon in Canadian classrooms.

We've seen coding and computational thinking finally worm their way into education curriculums, but this is the tip of a much bigger iceberg when it comes to understanding what digital skills are and how we should approach them.

Originally created for this post on why education is seemingly unwilling to address a persistent digital skills shortage (from 2023).

I've been pushing the boundary of what constitutes digital skills ever since I first got knocked out of digital technology by the compsci grads who had claimed the keys to the kingdom. It took me decades to recover and come around to the approach I have now that nurtures my hacking mindset rather than dismissing it.

A few weeks ago I attended a STEM space technology event put on by a partner of ours in Mississauga. Moonshot was designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of STEM careers - something we go out of our way to avoid in our departmentalized schools. If you're building space technology as an electronics engineer your job doesn't end where the wires stop, it also involves collaborating with all the other teams to ensure the electronics are working in conjunction with mechanical, communications, logistics and many other systems. Why do schools insist on siloing subjects like they do?

That siloing is also hobbling digital literacy development. The current coding/computational thinking fixation is just the latest in a long line of compsci blinkered approaches to addressing digital technology literacy. What would it look like if we represented the true breadth of digital and taught that wider scope of understanding in our classrooms? We use this technology daily to do everything from operate our schools to deliver learning across all subjects, but then avoid teaching how it all works at all costs.

At the Moonshot event I was introduced to the CEO of MineConnect, an organization that represents and works to promote the mining industry in Ontario. Our chat at Moonshot led to introductions with Science North over their Mine Evolution game. I'm hoping to get a web based version of that running on UBC's Quantum Arcade - perhaps with a quantum add-on as quantum sensing is going to drastically improve s in how we mine in the next decade.

What does this have to do with digital literacy? The fact that you're asking this question shows how little most people understand about where digital technologies come from, and that understanding should be a part of their literacy, don't you think? If you look up 'digital supply chain' you don't get what we need to build digital technologies, instead you only information on how to 'go digital'. Even industry goes out of its way to ignore what digital technology is... except in rare mineral mining, hence my work with Mine Connect and Science North.

It's incredible to me that this late in our adoption of this technology that we still go out of our way not to teach what is needed to make digital happen. The current wholesale adoption of A.I. in education is a great example of this ignorance, as was the rush to the cloud. There is no cloud (it's someone else's computer) and A.I. isn't intelligent, but we'll grasp at digital straws with willful ignorance if we think it'll make our lives easier.

In the CSL research I created a pyramid that showed how I taught digital awareness from the ground up in my rural high school. The assumption is that 'kids nowadays' know all of this, but that simply isn't the case. If you want to disable a 'digital native' it's as easy as flipping a switch they don't usually use. If you want to send a room of them into a panic unplug the Wi-Fi router (assuming you know what that is and where to find it).

Start with the physical substrata and work your way up into the more abstract realms of digital technology; starting digital fluency at coding is like starting literacy at poetry. 

In grade 9 I got a lot of digitally engrossed students who thought they knew it all because adults who lack even basic digital familiarity have been telling them that for years. Revealing that this perceived expertise is merely familiarity with a couple of devices and specific software doesn't take long. In many cases these kids had owned a series of game consoles and phones and that's it. Familiarity with software is limited to games and social media. Very few knew what an operating system was let alone the firmware that kick start it; this is literally how all computers work yet almost no one seems to know it.

Last week I was in Ottawa doing an introduction to OSes on our cyber range. The grade 5s didn't know what an OS was, but by the end of our 90 minutes they certainly did. They also learned the boot process any digital device goes through from firmware start-up to OS loading to where most users think computers start - when the desktop appears. They also got to interact with Linux as well as Windows on their Chromebooks (we use a cloud based cyber range so you're not limited to the restrictive OS on your local device). None of the students knew what Linux was, but they use it everyday because their Chromebook ChromeOS is Linux based. By the end of our afternoon they were navigating the settings in multiple OSes and understood how you could interrupt boot sequences to gain control and interrupt processes.

That we hand students tools like these without any understanding of what they are or how they work is a great failure in modern education, especially as we are only accelerating our use of these machines in classrooms. Considering how widespread their use is now, digital skills have become an ignored foundational literacy.

***

How did I tackle this ever widening digital divide in my program? We started by making our lab DIY. My seniors and I built the first iteration out of e-waste and then kept improving it as we found resources. In 2015 I returned tens of thousands of dollars in board run desktops which then got converted into half a dozen chromebook carts for other classes to use. In that first year our DIY conversion saved the board over tens of thousands of dollars.

In 2016 I contacted AMD and asked if they'd provide CPUs for our next upgrade, and they did! Our board's SHSM program provided additional funding and for a fraction of the cost of a board run computer lab we had significantly better hardware and control over installing our own OSes and software, which allowed us to provide digital learning opportunities others couldn't reach.

By 2018 we had a mix of AMD APUs that could handle the graphic modelling we were doing in our game-dev class. This meant they were also more than capable of running any other software we needed to build digital fluency from scratch. In the process my one teacher department went on to win multiple national awards across a staggering range of digital domains ranging from coding and electronics to IT & Networking, 3d modelling and cybersecurity. DIYing is essential if we're to build digital skills without those compsci coding blinkers on. Even worse is buying a ready-made 'edtech solution' which does it all for you and doesn't teach anyone (staff or students) how technology works. It also tends to trap you in a single brand rather than striving for agnostic digital comprehension.

Having a flexible digital learning environment that we built ourselves allowed us to create unique student projects. In grade 9 that means starting with Arduino micro-controllers. Not only did these open source electronics allow us to develop an understanding of the circuits that all digital technologies depend on, it also offered a tangible approach to programming where the lines of code would produce direct outputs like turning on lights or making music. By the end of the Arduino unit students were confident in building circuits and for many it was also their first opportunity to code in text as opposed to blocks.

As you can see by the gif, getting into Arduino in grade 9 means that by grade 10 students are building customized electronics solutions to everything from the PC temperature system you see to various robotics and digital art installations. One of my seniors worked out an Arduino based fuel management system for his pickup that he then sold to others. Understanding the electronics substrata that digital operates in is imperative for well rounded digital literacy.

From that basis in electronics and introductory coding we moved to information technology and networking - two subjects studiously ignored in schools even though every one of them depends on both to operate every day. We begin I.T. by walking students through PC parts in our recently delivered Computers For Schools desktops. After covering the safety requirements for tools and working with machines that can contain enough electricity to knock you out if you don't treat them with respect, we dug in.

The biggest point I make in PC building is about static management. As long as students respect the delicacy of the electronics (which they already understand thanks to Arduino), they quickly gain confidence and are never again tyrannized by this technology. After this unit no one calls a desktop PC a "CPU", because that's just one part of a much bigger device. Calling a desktop a CPU is like calling a car an engine.

We typically spend a week taking a part desktops and putting them back together. Getting them is no problem because no one wants desktops these days and CFS has piles of them they're aching to give to classrooms. When we wrap up the IT unit anyone who wants to take their computer home can - you'd be surprised how many students (and teachers) don't own a home computer. The best part? If it ever goes wrong they know how to fix it because the built it from the hardware up.

Once we got the hardware figured out we installed operating systems. This involves interrupting boot processes and learning how to navigate BIOSes and other types of firmware. Everyone gets to the point where they have Windows and Linux installed, but some students want to build an epic stack. This can involve adding extra hard drives and going through install processes on up to a dozen OSes. By the end of week two we've got OSes installed and students have explored many more than the one that came on their phone or game system (which are often Linux based). We've even had our share of Hackintoshes in the lab.

Our final step in the IT/Networking unit is to connect the desktops together on a local network and figure out IP addressing and all those other connectivity details most people have no concept of even though they use them daily. Building a network like this takes it out of theory and into tangible practice, as does the PC building. By the end of the week no one is calling connectivity 'WIFI' any more. Ethernet is ethernet and wireless is wireless and everyone knows how to configure and troubleshoot both. The motivation is that once we've got our network up and running on a domain where everyone can see each other we cue up a LAN party and everyone plays networked games on their DIY systems.

Our wide ranging and borderless approach to digital skills created interesting opportunities to mash up different technologies that are typically taught in siloed departments (if at all). In this case a student leveraged Arduino electronics, PC building and networking with robotics to build a whimsical LAN party robotrain.

We do eventually get to coding of course, but starting that far up the tech pyramid is absurd. High level coding languages (the only ones schools teach) are resource heavy because they spell out commands in easy to understand English (easier for humans = harder for machines). We did HTML and associated languages in grade 9 so the internet didn't baffle anyone anymore. In grade 10 it was Python simply because it's in such wide use. In the senior grades students choose their own coding focus, but not before I drag them through an introduction to low level 'machine language' programming so they have an appreciation for all the work those high level languages are doing for them. After you've had to do your own memory addressing, it changes you.

Leveraging this digital literacy, my seniors helped keep the tech in our building running smoothly. This not only saved money but also gave students invaluable public facing support experience. Perhaps the best example of this was our Chromebook graveyard. We would take in broken machines and then repair them with bits from others. After a couple of years of service most high schools in our board had lost over a quarter of their Chromebooks to abuse and accidents - we enjoyed a 90%+ active rate meaning more computers for more students at no extra cost.

The 'that's not your job' thinking that most boards operate under prevents this kind of innovation and cost savings. I always am left wondering to whose benefit.

The other benefit was that our digital fluency made us resilient. When COVID struck and everyone else folded up their classes and went home early, the digitally fluent students in my program didn't want to lose their semester's work and we went online, created our own Discord and landed it remotely. It took a bit of re-culturing because the students needed reminding that this isn't a gaming Discord - you're at school, but they quickly adapted and were sharing 3d models, Unity code snippets, circuit designs and network details back and forth to build complex demonstrations of their skills. In many cases they were doing it on the PCs they'd built when they were in grades 9 or 10 because many parents thinking digital technology is a toy.

So what's stopping us from graduating digitally fluent students with a wide range of skills who are ready to go into any field they choose because every one of them these days involves some kind of digital technology? I come from a time when home computers were brand new and no one had worked out how to 'do them' yet. In that primordial binary goo I hacked my own software and learned how to build my own hardware. My millwright apprenticeship turned to IT because of my familiarity with this new technology but I never came at it as a scientist might, but rather as a mechanic would. Hacking isn't bad, it's humans finding ways to approach digital technology as agents rather than consumers.

If we're going to tackle complex interdisciplinary digital technologies like artificial intelligence with anything other than willful ignorance, we need to start building an understanding of digital from the ground up so students and teachers can see beyond the box tech companies want to keep you in. If we're putting children on it, we should be showing them how it works so that they become more than what most of us are: consumers.

This is from a decade ago. FB has faded from relevance, but every 'tech' we use follows the same approach: your attention is the product being sold.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but cybersecurity offers a unique approach to tech that other subjects lack. Cyber is inherently about edge cases and encourages a 'meta' mindset when approaching digital environments. You're not a component inside the system, you've recognized its limitations and are working beyond it where being human is not only a benefit but essential. With all the 'AI doing it for you' going on these days does being human matter? Other approaches seem easier and wear 'academic credibility' better, but what is academic credibility but another system meant to contain your thinking? If we keep our current status quo we will, at best, produce another generation of passive consumers. We've tried that and it isn't going well. Time to hack this problem by putting students back in control of the technology we are using to control them. It's time to embrace your inner hacker.