Cracking Codes at Bletchley Park

Year 9 Students spent a (snowy) day at Bletchley Park, Cracking Codes

On Wednesday 8th March, Year 9 visited Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to discover more about code breaking. They began the day with an interactive workshop, learning, using and developing practical problem-solving and team working skills as they began to understand the scale of the task faced by Bletchley Park’s codebreakers during World War Two.

They also enjoyed the rare opportunity to use a genuine Enigma machine as well as encountering a range of historical codes and ciphers as they worked together to decipher messages in order to solve a puzzle.

After the workshop they had a chance to see the many exhibits and walk the Mansion, Museum and Huts where the codebreaking happened.

After lunch they delved deeper into the story of Bletchley Park and were given a guided tour around the outside of the buildings. They were told about the process of sending, intercepting and decrypting coded messages and what everyday life was like for those who did the codebreaking.

It was a great day, with many improving their existing skills in mathematical thinking, applying them to a practical codebreaking task and discovering lots of useful, new knowledge linked to our GCSE Computer Science specification