Students spent the day at the site of the WW2 code breakers, where mathematical minds and technological achievements came together to not only help end the war early, but also shape the world in which we live in today.
Students completed a cipher workshops, where they had to put their maths skills to use to break a series of cipher codes. They also learnt during the tour of the site how the code breakers had to use probability in their everyday life. They knew that some things were more likely than others and they worked out probabilities mathematically as a way to help narrow down the number of ways a message will have been encrypted.
From Alan Turing’s office, to the ballroom of the mansion house, lunch on the lawns where many code breakers would have rested between long shifts, the students got a good insight to what life would have been like at Bletchley.
