Caesar Cipher

Here are a few of the things that students did... This Week In Gifted!

The Caesar Cipher

We continued to learn more about the Caesar Cipher.  Students made their own cipher wheels and learned how to encipher and decipher messages with specific shifts (for example, a shift of one means that a = B, b = C, c = D etc, while a shift of 3 means that a = D etc.)  When it comes to deciphering messages, students identified tips to speed up the process such as; take good guesses when a word is partially deciphered and for longer messages decipher all of the instances of the same letter at the same time.

If you haven't been told what the shift is, sometimes you can figure it out by looking at the short words; this is especially helpful if there are any 1 letter words in your message as they will probably represent the words "a" or "I".  What if there are no 1 or 2 letter words in your message?  Some of the classes learned about analyzing letter frequencies.  The most frequently used letters in the English language are e, t, a, o and i.  If the most frequently used letter in the enciphered message is a K, perhaps it represents one of those four letters?

The Wednesday afternoon group hard at work with their cipher wheels.

All this enciphering and deciphering of messages can be time consuming (and makes some of us go a little cross-eyed).  If only there was a way to speed up the process...  this is where computers come in!  The students were introduced to the Crypto Club website; a great resource designed for kids to teach them about the world of cryptography.  We investigated some of the different tools they have to help you encrypt and decrypt Caesar Cipher messages.

Radio

We also talked a little more about radio this week; where do we listen to radio? what sorts of things can you hear on the radio? and what would kids like to hear on the radio?  Later this year we will be producing a radio show, so we'll be exploring topics related to radio most weeks.

Fun in the Sun

One of the perks that the Wednesday morning class has is that we get to have recess together and we usually have the whole playground to ourselves!  So I'll leave you with a few images from this week's recess.  

Thanks for dropping by to see what we've been up to.