… so it was great to get an email from one of the teachers taking part in the competition to tell us about last Friday. We asked if it was OK to tell you, and here is their account:
Every Friday lunchtime, we run a Cipher Challenge club in one of the computer rooms. We have a lot of teams participating in the competition and the room is often noisy, with plenty of activity and discussion taking place. It gives me an opportunity to introduce the younger students to the different types of ciphers, frequency analysis and so on. The older students who attend are more independent and they will use the time to search through the plaintexts and the case files for clues (one year, one of the teams plotted the route taken by the main characters on a map, adding to it each week as more details were revealed) and to work on materials and resources to help prepare themselves for the later rounds. Being a school, this is not the only club running on that day at lunchtime, and not all of the participants in the competition are able to attend. We had probably our busiest ever session at lunchtime today in one of the school’s computer rooms, with too many students from Years 7 to 13, not enough computers or chairs, and plenty of excitement and discussion as they got stuck into 7B – it was great!
One of the joys of the competition is having students coming to talk to me about how they are doing at other times during the day, such as at the school gates at the end of the day or when I am on duty on the playground. Last week the best performing team in the school in the final round was a Year 10 team that I did not know about, and I only found out they were participating and had cracked the final challenge when they randomly bumped into me one lunchtime. The Friday club, though, is where most of the excitement about the competition is most obvious, and it is always a delight to see students from Years 7 to 13 getting involved.