Enigma

Fingers crossed that the 2021-22 school year begins and continues on a more normal basis.

For two decades - missing only the Plague Year of 2020 - I have taught classes in the middle school's afterschool program.  The longest running was Machines Behaving Badly, now retired as the technology has become outdated and anyway we've started to just bump the smarter 8th graders up to the high school team.  I've also done assorted Advanced Robotics classes, some of which worked well, others not so much.  I even did a couple rounds of Dungeons and Dragons, and was gratified when another fellow picked this up and kept it running for years.  But what to do this fall?

Of course I'm hoping that the high school robotics team keeps meeting so doing the double Tuesday/Thursday option as in MBB is off the table.  So for a casual, flexible concept I've come up with something I call "Enigma".

This will be a series of one hour sessions where a small group of kids solves puzzles.  Really tricky puzzles.  I'm thinking cryptography, gps based scavenger hunts, riddles, crosswords, foreign language translation and who knows what.  The goal each week will be to learn something new, and to successfully identify a five letter code that unlocks this:

It's a wooden treasure chest, made long ago by one of my sons.  It now has a special padlock that allows me to change the combination.  And what's inside?  Actually even I won't know.  The program staff will take care of that.  I'm hoping Cheezits and Little Debbie cakes.  You won't greatly motivate kids with the conventional healthy fruits n' fiber snacks they are usually stuck with.

After perhaps six sessions I'll have the group switch over from puzzle solvers to puzzle creators.  Using what they have learned they will put together a multi stage code breaking, trivia, mapping challenge......and pose it to an all star team of teachers and administrators.  Who will prove to be smarter?

Other than my own amusement there is a point to this silliness.  I want kids to think.  Independently and critically.  To that end I am going to purposely include errors in some of the messages.  That's the real world.  Or, the messages will just look like errors and they will have to trust their work.  I'll ask a lot of questions.  And when they give me an answer - let's say a correct one - I will look at them over my glasses and ask skeptically: "Really?  Are you sure about that?"

My hope is that they will learn to look me right in the eye and confidently say: "Yep.  Very Sure".

That's the general direction.  In my course intro I am going to emphasize the point that I am not trying to make them into sneaky people.  No, what I'm trying to do is get their brains better able to figure out a world chock full of codes and puzzles.  And is there any time where they all make less sense than middle school?

In the interests of transparency, and because they might be of general interest, I'll be publishing the quizzes and best answers in abbreviated form in the weeks ahead.   Who knows,  maybe somebody out there will want to take this idea and run with it.