St Dunstans Visit

Huge thanks to year 6 for letting me visit today, and talk about codes and ciphers.  This is a part of their work on World War 2 at the moment.




We looked at some older ways of hiding codes, including shaving heads, tattooing it, and then letting the hair grow back, wrapping a strip of paper around a stick, and then writing the message, and even writing the message on the inside of a hard boiled egg (sadly this experiment has now failed 3 times, so it is not the most reliable method!!


We moved on to look at Caesar ciphers, pigpen ciphers (font here), and the Sherlock Holmes Dancing men cipher (Font here).  NB. Please ask permission before installing new fonts to your computer.


Eventually we moved on to talk about the magnificent work done by Bletchley PArk code breakers during the second world war.  We found a major flaw in the enigma code by putting loads and loads of 'D's into a virtual enigma, and looking at the output.  Here is the virtual enigma we used - can you spot any flaws!


I want to thank Y6 at St Dunstans again for letting me visit, and making me feel so welcome.  Hopefully many of them will work with us on the National Cipher Challenge when they join us next year