Maths Leaders from year 5 and 6 enjoyed the third Masterclass session hosted by our local secondary school. The focus today was code breaking! Children first discussed the history of code breaking, from the hieroglyphs used in ancient Egypt to Alan Turing and the Enigma machine.
Children looked at the frequency letters appear in the English language using a page in books to create tallies from each letter of our alphabet. They then used this to reason strategically about the likely hood of letters appearing in other languages and applied this to the game of hangman.
As the session progressed, children then needed to work collaboratively to break several different codes to finally unlock the final puzzle. It was so much fun and the Maths Leaders enjoyed sharing ideas, contributing to discussion and justifying their reasons to the wider group present.
