Can you crack the code? STEM Activity
Who doesn’t love a good secret?
Whether it’s an inside joke with your best friend or the latest trend in texting, we all seem to find joy in hiding our words from others.
But what about those people who use secrets and codes for more than just fun and games?
Enter the world of cryptology!
Cryptologists are individuals who specialize in translating coded messages from one form to another.
Secret codes are a way of communicating information that is not meant to be understood by others. They can be used for a variety of purposes, such as sending secret messages, hiding information, or preventing enemies from understanding your conversations.
Creating codes can also be a fun activity to do with kids!
In this blog post, you’ll find some information about code creation and breaking, and an activity to do at home.
Cracking codes
The most common technique in early code-breaking was to identify the pattern of the code and then replace it with a letter or number that had a similar pattern. This is called “cribbing”, which means making an educated guess about what word might follow based on its context. Another common technique was to look for words that were repeated often in the code, which were likely to be important words.
There were also more sophisticated techniques used, such as “frequency analysis”, which involved looking at the letter frequencies in the code and comparing them to the letter frequencies in the English language. This could give you a good idea of which letters were most likely to be represented by which numbers.
The people who were responsible for cracking the code were called “code breakers”. Some of the most famous code breakers include Alan Turing and William Friedman. They played a vital role in helping the Allies win the war.
There are different types of secret codes, each with its own set of rules
One common type of code is the substitution cipher, which replaces every letter in a message with a different letter. For example, the letter “A” might be replaced with the letter “D”, and the letter “B” might be replaced with the letter “E”. Another common type of code is the transposition cipher, which rearranges the letters in a message so that they are in a different order.
To crack a code, you need to first understand how the code works. Once you know the rules of the code, you can start looking for patterns.
Identifying patterns is the key to breaking any code!
Let’s try an example.
Say we have the following message:
PQY K JCXG C SWGUVKQP HQT AQW – ECP AQW ETCEM VJG EQFG?
This looks like gibberish, but there is actually a secret message hidden in there! Can you crack the code?
The first step is to identify the pattern of the code.
In this case, it seems that every letter has shifted a few letters down the alphabet. So, A becomes C, B becomes D, and so on.
Once we know the pattern of the code, we can start to decipher the message by replacing the letters.
The final message becomes:
Now I have a question for you – can you crack the code?
Congratulations if you cracked the code!
An activity to do at home
The team at Primary + STEM have identified the activity ‘Code Breaking WWII‘ to help children learn about code-breaking and the work undertaken by members of Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
The activity is a great way to teach children about the importance of codes, code-breaking, and cryptography during wartime. They will get to try their hand at cracking a secret code, and then decipher the message that is hidden inside.
The activity forms part of the Primary + STEM team’s curated selection of Teaching Resources which have been mapped to the Victorian education curriculum. There are over 100 STEM activities on the Primary + STEM website.
Click here to visit the learning resource and get started!
Information for teachers
This resource introduces students to the code-breaking work undertaken by members of Bletchley Park during the Second World War. A specific activity called Alphabet Tally is suited to the use of spreadsheet software such as Excel to interpret and create a visualisation (such as a frequency table) to crack an encrypted message.
This activity has been mapped to the Victorian curriculum:
- Learning area: F-10: Digital Technologies
- Curriculum code: Digital Technologies > Levels 5 and 6 > Data and Information > VCDTDI028
- Grade level: 5, 6