Thursday, May 25, 2006

Whodunnit? - Week 2



Here is the crime scene for our second class, a case of Industrial Espionage in the test kitchen of a famous cookie manufacturer. The kids quickly noticed that a break in had occurred, that the safe with a coded message inside had been accessed with the tools left behind by the culprit. It's harder to see but on the table is an Alberti Cipher Wheel and on the floor a package of chocolate chips with R=G written on it with black marker.

We discussed the history of secret messages and tried our hand at a grid cipher (check out the NSA's site for kids for some great information on this topic). Then we constructed our own cipher wheels and went to work on decoding the secret message from the safe. The kids really enjoyed this activity. We may try some other kinds of ciphers next week.

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