My Adventures as a Teen Aged Philosopher

Some of the stuff I retrieved from my parent's house last year just got tossed into a box. In some cases I looked briefly at an object, said "ugh" but felt it needed to be kept.  This is one such.  

I attended Minnehaha Academy for high school.  A private school, it likely gave me a better education than the public high school on our end of town.  It even had classes in religion, philosophy, etc.

I took a philosophy survey class as a junior or so.  It was a small group, maybe four or five of us students.  It was taught by a man named George Fisher, who had been a Catholic priest.  Here's the cover of the notebook from that class....

There was an awful lot of doodling and marginalia in this book.  Some of it related to philosophy, note the yin/yang.  Other stuff I'm not sure.  I might have been taking geometry at the same time to account for some of the shapes and formulae.  It starts out fairly coherent...

But towards the end I was clearly going off the rails.  I think Neo Platonism pushed me over the edge.

The class probably did me some good.  In this world sometimes you have to be philosophical and if you can't square it with Plato, maybe St. Thomas Aquinas will suffice.  The only student I remember, and the only one who seemed to understand this stuff, was named Winston Cavert.  I got to wondering where he ended up....turns out he also went to medical school but had a rather more impressive career than your humble scribe.  He went into infectious disease and became a Professor.  Cheers, Winston, if you stumble across this!

FIRST Robotics 2026- Week Four Report

Visible Progress during a FIRST robotics build season is not linear.  Sometimes you have students working very hard over keyboards and complex wiring.  It does not photograph well.  Then, you power up the robot and magic happens.  I call the first full function successful test the "Von Frankenstein Moment" for obvious reasons.

We were really close at the end of our long Saturday session.  But the robot just decided to be stubborn.  Better now than later.  But still, a steady week's work with no major setbacks.  (fingers crossed there).  There should be more to show in a day or two.

In the meantime....

We have a swell new "pit cart".  It is designed to hold everything we could potentially use for robot repairs.  Ideally nothing much more than the official Pit Crew card deck in the top drawer.  But if necessary there will be all manner of tools, spare parts, etc.

You actually have to take a lot of things to a robotics tournament.  We'll have one side of the cart with a white board for cartoons and messages.  Maybe the required fire extinguisher can be mounted on one side.  A fun little side project made entirely from scratch.  Some of the lumber we got for free.

We have the "hopper" attached.  The red tool box (the pit cart was designed to carry these) is where the launcher will be.  The polycarbonate hopper extends out over the intake system.  We were hoping to be able to carry 40 of these little "lemons".  Looks like we might hit 50!

Lots more coming soon.  In addition to the new pit cart we have a new robot transport cart.  It's off being powder coated.  Now, when I saw this thing I told the students that it was about the size of the car I was driving back in college.  So where are we going to park all this?  That is actually the question I spent six hours working on.

There's a back closet in the tech ed area.  It is full of stuff that has been jammed in there for a very, very long time.  Pet projects of teachers long retired.  Ham radio stuff.  CO2 powered cars.  Elaborate wind up airplanes and model rockets.  Boomerangs.  As our high school team works out of the middle school shop area I can but marvel at the prospect of 6th through 8th graders being allowed any access to boomerangs.   Also, text books.  

These are old.  That's not per se bad, some of them that deal with manual milling and machining of wood and metal are first rate.  But in the 21st century students are mostly not working from these archaic things called "books".  Most of the copyright dates are from the 1990's.  But a few went further back.  How far back?

Oh my.   And yes that is the date of this edition.  The first edition was listed as 1938.

For reference I was born one year earlier.

And there were other things to be found.  A whole batch of heavy, high quality mirrors.  Maybe for astronomy?  Dozens of cool wooden model kits where you can peg together little round balls and make models of atoms.  I had found mousetraps on the floor and assumed there had been an attempt to trap critters.  then I found a big box labeled "Mousetrap cars".  All this stuff is of debatable use.  The various car, rocket and airplane stuff has been reorganized and put on shelves appropriate for the priority.  The textbooks and such have been piled up for the tech ed teachers to rule on.  Of course any they deem still useful will be put back on the shelves.

There were other things in there too.  Robotics team stuff had also been haphazardly jammed in various places.  This makes it difficult to find, which is a problem independent of the "parking space" issue of the carts.  Sometimes you find mysteries.  I'll conclude with this item.  Let your imagination run wild....

Yeah, I Have a Question about This

Exactly what sort of vandalism involves lipstick?  Well, I noticed this at the middle school so darn near anything is possible.  A much belated National Custodian's Day.  I salute you.

An Indifferent Student

I seem to recall myself as being a rather clever student.  I learned to read early and was a voracious consumer of, well, anything.  Big stacks of books from the branch library at Jordan Junior High.  But....was I as smart as I remember myself being?  A case study, based on artifacts dredged from the basement of my parent's house.

Looks promising.  It contains among other things my report card from 3rd grade.

Now, back in that era you got either an S for satisfactory or an N for needs work.  That's it.  No Excellent or anything like that.  Opening it up I find that I got Needs Work for:

First half of the year, Works Well with other Children, Follows Directions, Works Well Independently, Begins and Finishes Work on Time, Uses Time Wisely, Listens Attentively, and Reads Independently for information and Pleasure.  OUCH.

The only thing I got an "N" for both halves of the year was for Writes Legibly.  Hey, I was destined to write prescriptions, gimme a break!

A bit of a come down.  I did get recommended to move up to Grade 4, and to my credit only was absent 1/2 a day, while turning up to be a mediocre student a full 176.5 days.

The Report Card was signed by my teacher, Mrs. Schwaub, and by both my parents.  My M.D. father's signature was very poor penmanship indeed.  The card was also marked with a stamp from Arthur T. Nelson, the Principal.  I remember him being chased down the hallway by a kid with a knife, who actually lived on our block.  Ah, the idylic 1960's.

I'm not sure what to make of this one.  In faint red ink up at the top it says "Please use your pencil".  Was this an instruction from the get go that I impudently ignored?  

I gotta say, in black Crayola crayon my penmanship, or shall we say penchildship, was pretty darn good.  You can see through the paper to some black crayon math that young "Timmy" as I then styled myself, absolutely crushed.

More stuff from "Timmy" age 6 1/2.  Now that I have a grand daughter about that age I can say, hey, that's outfit's a bit much, don't ya think?

 

Geeze, I hope this was from high school.  Geometry was the only math I every actually liked.  I got 18/20 on this page.  The preceding page was more word problems.  For example: Consider two simple closed curves which intersect at points A and B.  Consider a point C which is in the interior of one of the curves.  Various options were given, to each of which I had to respond True or False.  

21/30.  Guess I never really got to the Truth of Mathematics.  And for what it's worth I got out my pen and paper and tried to puzzle this thing out.  I think the teacher marked me off a couple of points incorrectly.

Subsequent finds of report cards from other years of grade school and Junior High did not, alas, show any sudden flourishing of academic genius.  And high school?  Lets not talk about high school.

And the Seasons Change

The official starting and ending dates of seasons are just dates on a calendar.  Life has other markers for change.  For instance, when I start to hear the sounds of the high school marching band practicing, summer is drawing to a close.

Of course there are other clues.  It's been a great year for growing things, so my hops are heading for a record crop.  Maybe I'll even brew beer with them this year.

The other day it was time to sign up for fall deer hunting tags.  Over the past months we've seen the deer on our land go from pregnant does, to skinnier does with spotted fawns, and now onto various family groupings.  The bucks seem to all hang out together, wandering around in a gang.  Sure, they all look friendly now, but when they all go crazy during mating season it will be another story.

No real summer trips.  Not much fishing, and only one new species to show for it.  Lots of robot stuff.  That season never really ends.  But it does have pauses.

We just finished the summer build with middle schoolers.  They did excellent work, and most of them seem to have caught the bug.  They've all signed up for our fall "Robot School".  And evidently invited all their friends.  So now I'm trying to figure how we can accommodate 20 students when we think our capacity for good instruction is about 12.  Hmmmm.

Well, its good to be busy.  In this brief interval between things I've got projects long delayed to take on.  And potentially some really big tasks in the year ahead.

See you around.

Bollards

We've gotten pretty accomplished at using public transportation in England.  It helps that the bus runs in front of our pub/accommodation, with the train only a few hundred yards away.  I have never been willing to drive in the UK.  It's the "wrong side of the road" thing along with the narrow twisty roads full of interesting things to be looking at instead of what I should be.

From the window of the bus we saw this.  And as it was only a mile from home base I had to go back and inspect.

These are traffic bollards, sturdy posts on the edge of roads.  Just in case a distracted, careless or American driver comes by.  They are of course outside the village school.

A nice union of form and function.  I suppose the fact that the tip of the pencils is red is just for that added bit of safety, not a reminder of papers to be corrected!  They look sturdy.  I bet they'll still be standing when students no longer know what a pencil actually is!

Reunion

Some events in life are by their very nature recurring.  They pass without much comment.  Others you must be fortunate to experience but could happen several times.  Grandchildren are an obvious one.  But there is at least one event that is inevitable, if of course you live long enough.

Your 50th high school class reunion.

I went to the five year reunion.  It was interesting.  Everyone looks their absolute best at about age 23.  In particular, and please bear in mind that I was then single, the girls, by then of course women, were quite presentable

Since then the reunions have been at times and places that were logistically difficult, and that is the case once again.  I'd be willing to invest an afternoon/evening in the project, but having to drive a fair distance, attend an event at an (ugh) Country Club and then stay overnight in an expensive hotel....nah.

My brother took a pass on his 50th last year.  So while we were laboring in the hot sun on the Homesteading Project it was something we discussed.  I tend to get philosophical in such matters and wondered if it would be best to attend as who you were, who you are, or who you'd like to be.  This sets aside the question of whether you "are" who you think you are or who they think you are.  I concluded that the ideal would be to attend in an entirely different persona.  Drop vague hints about your life but give few details.  Wear a fez and perhaps an eye patch.  Deflect all questions on either.

The next day while walking the dog he dragged me straight into a patch of brush and I got a minor corneal abrasion that required me to wear an eye patch for two days.  I had been given a Sign.

So, rather than devote roughly a day of my remaining span of time to satisfying mild curiosity my RSVP will consist of this letter. 

Well.  A decade here, a decade there...pretty soon we're talkin' half a century.  The time and place of the upcoming reunion being logistically challenging,  I shan't be in attendance.  Besides, Tatiana says it sounds rather boring; but she did suggest it might be possible to hire an actress to stand in for her. "Maybe somebody who could play the part of an Indiana farm girl or some such".  

I'm at one of our home bases now but have had a chance to travel widely.  Herr Kauls would be pleased that I've become sufficiently fluent in German to occasionally be mistaken for Dutch.  I've also picked up snippets of French, Italian and enough Arabic that one of my sons and I worked out a routine for getting through souks unbothered by convincing the merchants we were from a former Soviet Republic called Tegwaristan.  I've traveled by jet, ferry boat, on foot and once memorably as a hobo riding the rails.

In the course of a single unusual year I found a way to be employed as an Emergency Room doctor, a Carny, a robotics instructor and on an archaeological dig.  On expeditions of the latter sort I've found everything from intact roman shoes to live World War I artillery shells.

I've had a book published, two screen plays rejected, and am almost certainly the only alumnus of our revered Alma Mater to be invited to speak at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

It has been a fun if occasionally implausible life.  By the way, the details above are actually 84% true, which is probably a better percentage than what is traded in casual banter at surreal gatherings of people who knew each other most of a life time ago.....

Please keep me on the list for future gatherings.  'Tats' says she'll go to the 100th, and as she is scandalously younger than I she's probably good for it.  I will also plan on attending, if for no other reason than to hoist a valedictory flagon of whatever Faustian Concoction has been keeping me alive long enough to become the Last Member of the Class of 1974.

There was a return envelope with the announcement of the reunion.  No postage of course.  I'll festoon it with as many weird stamps as I can round up and put as a return address the Pilersuisiq store in Arsuk, Greenland.

Mr. Magoo goes to Venice?

I should explain that this would be Venice, Florida not Venice Italy.  Confused?  Well, we have to start somewhere.  How 'bout here:

Driving around on our Florida vacation we would repeatedly go over a bridge that was called "The Kentucky Military Institute Bridge".  Hmmm, I see I'm not doing much regards unconfusing things.

We went out for brunch one day in a little French bistro on the corner of this building.  The Historical plaque was fairly helpful.  I think it is worth quoting in full:

During Florida's Boom Period, 1922-1928, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE) purchased 30,000 acres in Venice, believing it was a sound investment where "rail, trail, and water meet." They hired renowned city planner John Nolen to design Venice. Construction soared, but land sales soon slowed and eventually halted. The BLE pulled out in 1928, and as a result of the economic bust and the Great Depression, Venice became a veritable ghost town.

West Point graduate Robert T. P. Allen established the Kentucky Military Institute (KMI) near Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1845. In 1906, KMI established a Florida winter campus in Eau Gallie, near Melbourne, to improve the cadets' health and academic performance by reducing sick leave through Florida's available year-round recreation. In 1932, Colonel Charles B. Richmond selected Venice as its new winter campus as the previous one had burned. KMI initially rented and later bought the San Marco Hotel (today's Venice Centre Mall), the Hotel Venice (now a retirement center), and the Annex between the two to provide housing for the faculty and cadets, as well as classrooms, kitchen, dining hall, offices and infirmary.

On January 5, 1933, 1500 people welcomed the first KMI contingent of students, faculty, and staff. Venice soon benefitted from the infusion of funds spent by the newcomers and their visiting families and friends; one report stated, "The school breathed new life into the discouraged city." The colorful and inspiring Sunday dress parades, held on the parade grounds (today's Centennial Park and municipal parking lot), quickly became a favorite attraction for residents and tourists; for the cadets it was "testing time" as they were inspected and graded. The cadet band and the Kentucky Rifles, a precision drill platoon, also participated. The Sweetheart Parade, held close to Valentine's Day, honored five local young ladies, each sponsored by one of the five cadet corps. Athletic competitions, such as track meets, were held on the parade grounds, too. In 1970 the Venice campus closed, and KMI sold its Kentucky properties in 1973. Decreased enrollment, higher operating costs, and anti-war sentiments during the Vietnam War contributed to the school's closure. Venice, however, has never forgotten the cadets and their important role in the city's history.

That is a fair amount to unpack.  The history of KMI is long and as I see it, a bit mixed.  Most of their students did not seem to go on to military careers.  Although some did, on both sides of the Civil War.  Some were officers that history remembers well, others....not so much.

In general "Military School" seems to have been a place you'd send your rowdy, out of control kid to try and get them straightened out.  I was a young person at the very tail end of this era and the context of Military School was pretty well established.

Oh, and Mr. Magoo?  Or actually Jim Backus who brought him to life.  (As he also did with Thurston Howell III)!

Backus was a student at KMI for a brief period.  He later described it as "Alcatraz with tuition".  It's not clear whether he made it to the Florida campus in the winter months.  He and his pal, future co-star Victor Mature, seem to have been in trouble from the get go.  

Did the future Mr. Magoo really get expelled for riding a horse through the dining hall?  Was he there making non Magoo-goo eyes at the local beauties in the "Sweetheart Parade"?  

Sources are always slippery when dealing with show biz matters.  I have read that Backus spent his sophomore year of high school at KMI, which could put him in Florida circa 1931.  Alas for our narrative that does not put him in Venice.  KMI operated their winter campus at a variety of Florida locations starting in 1907.  Initially they had purchased the ghost town of Eau Gallie, but had to move from there after their campus burned down.  (And not for the first time btw!)  Jim Backus may have hit one of the brief time periods when a Florida campus did not exist, and had to content himself with misbehaving at the main campus in Lyndon, Kentucky.

Teach a Man to Fish....and he'll probably skip school after that part.

 Seen on the public pier, Bayfield Wisconsin.

Dog University

It appears I now have a full time dog.

He comes to us with a bit of what you could either call ill discipline or roguish charm.  Either way it has been made clear that Rules will be Obeyed.

Whether this means me or him is open to interpretation.  In the end it does not matter, because dog training classes teach the lunkheads on either end of the leash.

I was not quite sure how he would do at Dog University.  Would he be a frightened, lost freshman, reluctant to venture out into the world?  Would he be a rambunctious frat boy trying to hump the instructor's leg?

In the end he was just fine.

He's really motivated by the constant dog treats that this involves.  I anticipate him putting on the dreaded "Freshman fifteen" and may have to cut his school day chow rations accordingly.  He's smart enough to eye me very suspiciously when I do so.

Robot School 2023

It's back.

In the summer of 2019, pretty much on a whim, I invited some promising middle school students to come work alongside the high school robotics team in an informal setting.  This was dubbed "Robot School".  It was a considerable success.  In fact there are a half dozen upperclasspersons now on the team from that casual experiment.  Most of them in leadership roles.

We had another, larger Robot School in the summer of 2021.  This was an official summer school class.  Seven current members "graduated" to Team 5826 from that crop, and another half dozen or so were direct invites from Robot School Children.  If you are looking for six or seven newbies a year to keep up with the lamentable tendency of students to graduate, this is a very effective recruiting and training machine.

Time to fire it up again.

This iteration is in the afterschool program and is limited to current 7th and 8th graders.  We set the limit for Robot School 3.0 at seven and it filled very quickly despite a 5am online signup time.  This was done so that employed people had a fair shot at getting their kids in.  The waiting list has 16 names on it.

Building a basic drive base.  This thing has been assembled and disassembled multiple times and is getting a bit beat up from that.  Oh, and from being crashed fairly often.

The return of Snack Challenge.  It takes various forms but is always something they should work together as a team to figure out.  Sometimes they don't get the extra good Robot School snacks if they can't manage a solution.  But this problem was significant enough that they needed to work on it with decent blood sugar levels.  And they did find a solution.

CAD designing a bracket for the next stage of the process.  This is a kid who had never touched a CAD program before.  Now something he designed is being laser cut for fabrication.

Another part of the crew is working on control systems.  They are over in the other room but do wave through the door way to be sociable.

Some excellent future team prospects in the bunch.  Current team members and coaches are trainin' them up right.

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.

Enigma Four (2022)

 

School schedules have their own quirks so no Enigma class last week.  That gave me two weeks to work on a suitable challenge.

Each group of students has their own strengths and weaknesses.  This year's bunch is big on foreign languages.  Last year's could not do a crossword if their lives depended on it.  

Another quirk this year is that there were significant staff changes in the program so it started a couple of weeks later.  That means only four working sessions, one for prep and one for Staff Challenge.  So what to do with our last working session?

Time to bring back our old pal Anastasia Ottendorf.....

If you don't know what an Ottendorf cipher is I'm not gonna tell you.  

They also liked a little side project we did in week one with a cipher "grill".  That could be made trickier.  Square versus rectangular gives more possible permutations.  And can I actually suggest wrong answers with subtle cues?

Well our last teaching session went pretty well.  I am pleased when the challenges I put to them can be solved with a bit of concentration.  Honestly, we worked on relaxation techniques to clear your mind!  I'm also pleased when they fall for a cleverly laid trap.  Because next week is prep time for the Staff Challenge, and the week after that we'll have a team of administrators and teachers trying to solve this stuff.

I took the precaution again of including a counselor on the list of invitees....to help the staff with their issues.  Alas she could not make it so they are On Their Own.

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.

Enigma Two (2022)

 

On the menu this week: ciphers.  We started with ancient versions and worked our way up to basic machine cryptograms.  You did know why the course is called Enigma, didn't you?

The Julian cipher is one of the oldest known ones.  Helpful if you only wanted to have your message safe from the eyes of smelly barbarians who might waylay a courier.  Heck, you might decide to send a special message just to punk 'em a bit.....

Of course Julius Caesar would have framed it a bit differently.  Here's the follow up cipher....

OLFACIES VERE MALUM

To their credit they were able to pick the actual message out of the random strings generated by this method of cipher breaking.  And they called it as a foreign language.  They guessed French, which is closer than you might think, Greek, which one kid say could not be the case as they had different letters, and finally "Roman".  I did have to give them credit for that but of course it is Latin.  

Then I asked them to translate it.  They got MALUM pretty easily after I told them to go through a dozen words with the Mal prefix.  VERE has not changed much at all, and OLFACIES made sense since it was basically the same message as before just the way a Roman would have actually written it.

We had a run at breaking random ciphers with character analysis but their brains were too fried.  Its the run up to Homecoming this week and Halloween shortly so you have to make allowances.  The final question did provide me with a good ten minutes of entertainment as I assured them that the paper they found hidden under a chair cushion actually did contain the combination that opened the snack safe.  Really.  They just had to ask the right follow up questions.....

XFGGRRFM !

Enigma One (2022)

 

First session of the middle school "Enigma" class.  Just as last year we lead off with a mental exercise called "Interstellar".  They first had to consider what sort of message they would chose to broadcast out into the cosmos....and how they would do it.  Then they were given some shocking information detected by astronomers.  We are definitely NOT alone.  But what are the aliens saying?  Given the origin of the signal what might they know about us?  

They eventually figured out that the pattern of light on/light off was a simple binary code which formed a picture.  While they ate snacks we walked through how many signaling devices - an on/off light, an arm raised or not - it takes to convey a specific "message".  One device, we'll call it a bit, can give two distinct messages.  yes/no, 1/0, Hi! or I ignore you.

I tossed a copy of The Gulag Archipelago on the table and asked how many "bits" it would take to encode it.  Of course the answer is 8 ( 8 bits gives you 256 possible combinations, enough for alphabet with caps, numbers 10-9, punctuation, special characters and a few left over for foreign letters and maybe a couple of emojis.  8 bits also makes one byte.)

Congratulations were in order and forthcoming, as they had just discovered the basis for digital computer storage.

As always in Enigma the final answer is a code that opens a padlock.  Contained within the (literal) Black Box was a greeting from Elsewhere and a batch of snacks far better than the usual nutritious granola crap they get fed.

Because I can't predict the ability of a group until I actually meet them I also had a backup shorter challenge....

I'm keeping quiet on this one.  They handled it well but feel it has potential for the staff challenge if we make it just a teeny bit harder!  Smart kids.  The staff has reasons for concern.

Enigma 2022

 

Last year I ran a course called Enigma in the local middle school's after school program.  It was made up as we went along and featured code breaking, minor spy craft, gps tracking and a few side orders of linguistics and such.  The students did well and then used what they learned to cook up a Challenge that was taken on by a recruited team of Staff All Stars.  The teachers and administrators did pretty well but to be fair the students were there to help out.

Although done partly for my amusement there are a couple of serious points to this nonsense.  One, it is a good training ground for future problem solvers on the high school robotics team.  And more generally it is a much needed exercise in actually using their brains.  Too often kids just blindly accept what teachers or peers say, or assume that Wikipedia or Youtube know all.  They. Do. Not.  Lets learn some critical thinking in the classic sense of the word.

To that end I'll be using some of the same material this time around and will intentionally build in errors.  Hey, I'll be straight with them.  On day one I will tell them that I am the sort of instructor who might mislead them just to see if they catch me at it....and if they have the confidence in their answers to tell me when they think they are right and I am wrong.

Because the invited Staff All Stars will probably have similar membership and might remember  things from last year, and also because they seem the sort to consult the internet looking for an edge, I will not give detailed answers this year.  Nah.  I'll post modified versions of the weekly challenges with just enough misdirection to keep the Staff honest if they are playing along at home.

It will be fun.  And easy.  Trust me.

England 2022 - Seen Along the Way

On a very long day of travel I passed through King's Cross Station in London.  There is a bit in the Harry Potter books where wizards pass though a special door to get on the Hogwart's Express.  They've made it official now, with a luggage cart half embedded in the wall and an assortment of scarves and wands you can borrow.

Bit of a scam, it is nowhere near platforms 9 and 10.  But it is adjacent to this specialty shoppe:

 

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.

 

Enigma - Deep Cover

Our little band of middle school cryptographers/puzzle solvers has switched over to puzzle creation mode.  The students made up a list of staff they wanted to challenge, and I added a few more.  I mean, it just makes sense to have the School Resource Officer there to be a real detective, and one of the School Councilors there in case the grown ups need consoling!  I'm particularly looking forward to having the middle school building principal taking part and have moderate hopes that the District Superintendent will make an appearance.

So, Operational Security measures are in place and I can't show you exactly what the kids are concocting.  But I can say that when I asked if they should go easy on the staff the immediate response was "Nah".

We will of course be taking the parts of the Enigma class that worked the best and/or were the most fun.  One thing we'll be discussing is how many extra hints/bits of help would be appropriate.  I guess in a teaching situation, even with the roles delightfully reversed, if they ask you have to help them.  They rather liked the idea that the Staff would have to ask their permission for limited use of the internet to solve this.

Going from student to teacher is not an easy transition.  They are children after all.  Smart children.