Enigma Class - The Staff Challenge

My little crew of middle school cryptographers spent two sessions prepping a particularly complicated series of challenges for a team of invited Staff All Stars.  This turned out to be a mix of their favorite teachers and a few that I figured we should include.  Administrators, the school resource officer (so we could have a real detective!), a counselor to help the staff cope with stress...

Getting stuff ready:

Rules were established.  Staff were not allowed to use electronic devices.  Anything they needed they had to ask for.  We detailed a pair of students to work with each of the three Staff teams, crypto, Enigma and GPS.  This was not an easy series of challenges, as they just kept leading deeper into the labyrinth.

After the dust settled, here's the working board.  The random cipher, that had to be solved with frequency analysis, read "Place the laser carefully on the mark at Fiction Section MB in the library".  Of course they had to ask for the laser.  They put it on the mark.  It did not work.  They had to ask for batteries.  It sent a laser dot to where the next clue was waiting.

Eventually they found an Alberti wheel.  Worthless without the initial settings.  Of course the settings could be figured out once you'd done the GPS challenge, found all the Scrabble tiles and figured out the message!

The odd item in the foreground was one of the geocaches.  Not the one dubbed Bark, Bark.  Nah, this one was fairly easy.

Eventually the staff used the wheel to decode the final cipher.  It came through as gibberish.  But they were clever enough to recognize double encryption and used the 3 place rotation they'd done earlier to solve the final clue, the one that gave them the five letter combination.  It read:

"Did you ________ anything?"

I think they did.

There's talent here.  Some of them will be moving up to the robotics world in a while.  Even the ones that have been a significant pain in the rear have potential.  From considerable experience I can spot kids who are acting goofy in part through profound boredom.

That we can work with.