Enigma Staff Challenge 2022

Time for the second annual Enigma staff challenge.  My little band of middle school cryptographers only had four weeks of work time and one of prep time.  But they learned quickly and are a devious bunch, so the challenges they put to an All Star Team of teachers and administrators were actually a bit harder than last year.  One of the things I taught them is how very much fun it is to see someone wander off track in exactly the direction you led them off into!

Four envelopes.

The usual rules.  Students are now the teachers and vice versa.  No unauthorized use of electronic devices.  All questions are fair game and encouraged.  Considerable latitude is allowed in the answers.  Oh, no outright fibbing, but there is nothing wrong with leading your student to the correct answer by a route that is both educational and entertaining....

Here the District Superintendent labors over a complicated cipher.

One challenge could only be solved with the help of a specific book in the library, which was adjacent to where we were holding the challenge.  It took them quite a while, perhaps because I threw in a bit of distracting bait in the wrong places...

Some things worked remarkably well.  It is human nature when you are handed something, say an encoding grid, to assume that things written on them should be read right side up.  But why would you assume that in a challenge where the stated intent is to mislead?  The students, who had of course fallen for this a couple of weeks back, found the struggles of the staff on this one to be quite humorous.

On the other hand the gps component of the challenge did not go that well.  It snowed over the last few days which made my tracks visible as I placed the clues an hour before the challenge began.  Of course I had to make several tracks go off into the adjacent woods!  And one clue was previously oriented with respect to a tree....which had been cut down in the intervening three weeks.  The gps hunters came in cold and overdue.  But they did find them all.

Mantra of the day was:  Be the kind of student you wish you had every day.  Be the kind of teacher you wish you had every day.  I think that was mostly adhered to but this batch of students had a delightful wicked streak and made the administrators and teachers really work for it this year.

We'll be seeing some of these kids again in future endevours.