Enigma Three (2022)

 

Last week I fear I over worked the brains of my middle school codebreakers.  Or maybe they did it to themselves.  Some of them are extremely clever and the test ciphers they cooked up for each other were quite nasty.

So this week a bit of physical exercise.  

GPS scavenger hunt time.

I'm not the incorrigible junk picker I used to be.  Why sometimes I can even walk past a dumpster and just look in without hauling stuff out.  But I did come across a couple of perfectly functional GPS units recently and they are perfect for our purposes.

Because it is too much work to set up actual geocaches I just set a series of "waypoints".  These are coordinates the kids will be directed to, but they still have to figure out, from the name of the waypoint, what to be looking for.  And I don't make these easy-peasy.

Eventually they had a collection of letters.  Looks a bit like a ransom note:

This is a clever bunch.  They had the anagram figured out in short order and still had fifteen minutes of time left.  So we took another run at random cipher breaking with frequency analysis.

They did better this time.

The mix of physical and mental activity seems to work well.  The former probably helps the latter.