Exploring ciphers and coding at Bletchley Park
On Wednesday 1st May, a group of Year 7 and Year 10 students went to Bletchley Park and had a day filled with exploring an iconic and integral landmark that was used for deciphering secrets and coding messages. The visit was a combined maths and computing trip. Bletchley Park’s codebreakers are estimated to have shortened the war by up to two years through their intelligence work and our students were able to explore the iconic site and learn about the work that was done there.
A coding and ciphers workshop was delivered by a lady whose parents were from Cambridge University and Oxford University, and had been recruited to work at Bletchley during the war. They met at Bletchley Park and got married. Her father’s best man at the wedding was John Cairncross himself (huge gasp from Mrs Malik when we heard this)! She was wonderful and even showed us a real enigma machine (worth over £500,000) which we were allowed to press at the end of the workshop.
We were also led on a very informative tour by a retired gentleman volunteer who had us wearing props and his real Cambridge University scarf as part of the tour. The heavy fire helmet was given to the eldest in the groups first (aka the teachers) then passed round for all to try on.
There was so much to see and do that although we had 3 slots to explore the grounds, mansion, huts and exhibits, we honestly could’ve seen much, much more. The D-Day video was incredible and from the historic artefacts, coding, holograms, props we could wear to the beautiful grounds, we had an amazing time.
All the students showed high levels of integrity and contribution, behaving incredibly well as the site staff plus our coach driver Andrew commented on how well behaved they were.
Mrs Malik
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