June 15, 2005

To begin the third day of the Forensic Science workshop, Bobby started talking about cryptography and ciphers. In the first activity, students dealt with a rotating alphabet cipher, with the key based on the remainder from a math problem. The students then had to decode a message using the given key.

After solving another rotating alphabet cipher, the students played a game in which they had to decode an intercepted message from a criminal. For this activity they used a strategy based on statistics about the most commonly found letters in a sentence.

Cornelia explained the reasons and uses of modern cryptology, such as protecting secret documents or important messages, and asked the kids what they would encrypt. Next, Cornelia brought up a webpage, that provided both rotational and randomized codes for the students to try and break.

A planned fire drill temporarily interrupted the second half of the workshop, but then students got right back to work. For the remainder of the class Cornelia gave students a several paragraph long encrypted message to decrypt. The kids worked together, but the first one to successfully decode the message will win a prize.