Bletchley Park Trip
On Friday 18th March, Year 5 and Year 6 went on a trip to Bletchley Park. The coach journey there took about one and a half hours!
When we arrived, we went to an exhibition called “Secrecy and Security” and did some quizzes about internet safety.
Next, we went to our workshop, cracking codes! Here are the different codes that we learnt:
This is what the Enigma is based on. You can use a Caesar Wheel to help you with decoding.
Morse Code is a series of dots and dashes using slashes for spaces. This was used in wireless radio transmissions.
The way you would crack this code is you’d write the alphabet on a piece of paper, then you write backwards under it and look at the letters above it, so Z would be A, and B would be Y, and so on.
This code was probably the easiest to do, because all you did was what it says - read backwards.
Pigpen was probably the most interesting code because it didn’t use numbers or letters. It used special symbols that were really just lines with dots.
After lunch (which we had in one of the Bletchley Park huts), one of the members of staff at Bletchley Park took us on a tour of the whole place. We learnt what the different huts were used for (Hut 8 was used to try to crack the Enigma Machine, and Huts 3 and 6 worked closely together, Hut 6 deciphering Morse Code from the Nazi wirelesses, and Hut 3 translating the codes), and we saw some vehicles that were used.
Our trip to Bletchley Park was a truly wholesome learning experience, and extremely fun!
By a Year 5 Student