Enigma Three - Alexandria Ottendorf

The mystery courier "A.O." has now been identified as Alexandria Ottendorf.  Surveillance cameras recently showed us this.  Hmmmm, something is going on here.

Note:  This is from an earlier photo shoot.  When I took the book home to use it in the encoding process I was appalled.  Absolute dreck.  This was such juvenile stuff I'd not put it in front of juveniles.  I pulled a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology off my own shelves and we snapped another quick photo.

Go.

-------------------------------------------------  

First we did a quick review of simple ciphers for the benefit of students who were out last week.  You can see the decrypt.  They did this very quickly and I had hopes for another stellar session.

Next up were the Alberti wheels.  This is a quick way to encode and decode messages....so long as sending and receiving parties each have the same wheel and starting settings.

Here I made a tactical error.  They wanted this to be boys versus girls.  Well with the weather  being unseasonably warm they were squirrely to start with and so this was not a great choice.  They were at times acting like middle schoolers.  Which of course they are.  But still......

The girls sent a straight forward, albeit slightly chilling, message that Team Guy decrypted in very short order:

When Team Girl Power attempted to decrypt the message they got from the guys, well nothing came out but random letters.  For me the highlight of the day was watching one of the girls think deeply, pause a moment and say "Hey, wait a minute".  Of course what the guys had done was to FIRST ENCODE THE MESSAGE IN JULIAN CIPHER and then code it on the wheel!  Much goofball behaviour, on both sides, was forgiven for that bit of creative thinking, which again was on both sides.

Eventually they got a photo similar to the one at the top.  It took them way too long to figure out that Ottendorf was the clue, it is a type of book cipher where numbers stand for page, para, sentence, word and sometimes letter.  Which of course was what was on this bookmark tucked into page 219.  Actually Alexandria was also a clue.  Tells you to look in the Library.

The final answer, the five digit code that won the snacks, was WATER.  If your copy of Bullfinch is the correct edition you can solve it yourself.

Tiring, and a session with middle school students both at their best and at their somewhat annoying baseline.