Year 8 crack codes at Bletchley Park

On Wednesday 22 May, sixty Year 8 students and seven members of staff went on a day trip to Bletchley Park. We wanted to find out how maths was used during the Second World War to break the German and Japanese codes. It was exciting to be in such a secret place and to hear about the lives of the 7,500 young women, mostly aged between 17 and 22, who worked tirelessly to solve the secret of the hardest encryption tools that the world had ever seen. One of these women, who had helped to crack the Japanese code, never mentioned to her husband of 65 years that she was fluent in Japanese! During a workshop, students were allowed to touch a real Enigma machine that had been used by a German officer in a field camp during the war. We were also challenged to code and encode signals using an electronic simulation of the Enigma machine, created on ipads. Our decoded messages were used to position flags on a map of the Atlantic, each flag representing a "wolfpack" of enemy U-boats which were trying to attack our trans-Atlantic convoys. There was also an exhibition dedicated to Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who cracked the code using his incredible Bombe machine. The life of Alan Turing was accompanied by many interesting exhibits, including Turing's teddy bear (complete with a handmade pair of tartan dungarees)!