Codes and Ciphers




Anyone who has grown up watching detective TV shows during the 1980s would have seen the heroes (and the villains) using codes and ciphers to send secret messages to each other.

You and your children can have so much fun making up codes, sending secret messages to each other, and decoding them.

The simplest secret code substitutes each letter of the alphabet with a number, letter, or symbol. For example, A becomes 1, B becomes 2, and so on. So "My name is John" gets written as "13 25 14 1 13 5 9 19 10 15 8 14".

Another is to use the alphabet backwards as a code. A becomes Z, B becomes Y, and so on.

You can make your own code, substituting symbols for letters, for example.  You can read about some other codes here.  If you have materials at home, this video shows you how to make and use a secret decoder wheel.

Another activity you can do is learn the Morse code, which is comprised of dots and dashes (or "dits" and "dahs"). Morse code messages can also be sent through taps or beats or knocks or other similar sounds - short taps for the dots and long taps for the dashes. Learn one letter at a time. A useful resource is this website. There are many others online. One suggestion is to learn the letters S and O first, so that in an emergency, you can easily send the universally known distress symbol SOS: . . . - - -  . . .




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