At Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club this week we used the Dancing Men Cipher, from the Sherlock Holmes short story of the same name.

Our activity was to make a set of Ancient Greece Top Trumps playing cards. I had made the cards, featuring an image, a description and the statistics, but without the name of the god, goddess, mortal or creature. The children had to decode the name using the cipher, then write it on the card. There were 34 cards in total, which the children completed between them. We then had a game of Top Trumps. The magic category was the most popular.  We finished with a matching pairs memory game: the pairs were all characters from Ancient Greece. These activities really helped to consolidate the children’s growing knowledge of Ancient Greece mythology.

At Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club this week we practised some vexillology i.e. the study of flags. I bought some Harry Potter World theme park maps. I then wrote a sequence of instructions to navigate the way around the theme park. I added North and West coordinates to the maps. I then encoded the locations of various places on the map using flag designs, with colours representing numbers. The children were able to successfully decode the flag colours as map coordinates, then read the coordinates on the map to find the location. I threw in some questions about each location, to extend those children who were Harry Potter fans. The other children enjoyed the combination of flags and maps, and having their first go at reading map coordinates.