Recently we were very fortunate to have a visit from the outreach team at Bletchley Park, who brought with them an original German Enigma coding machine used in World War Two to send secret messages between different units of the German armed forces.
The story of Bletchley Park is fascinating and students from all years were able to learn how codes work and part of the story of how British code breakers were able to crack the top secret German codes. Without this it was more than likely that the United Kingdom would have been unable to feed its self as too many ships were being sunk by German submarines. The course of history could have been very different. The Bletchley Park story has been immortalised in several books and the film the Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the Enigma machine brought to Holly Lodge was the same one that starred in the film.
Pupils had a fascinating time they all had the chance to practice their codebreaking skills and learnt the difference between a code and a cipher and the maths skills that underpin both codes and code breaking. In addition they got the chance to handle a piece of real history and understand its historical significance.
Learning how to put you own initials into code on the Enigma machine
Year 12 and 13 learning just how technically difficult it was to crack the German codes