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 c...