For The Love of Ciphers: A Hop, A Skip and A Jump

We have run many classes for kids in cracking ciphers, and generally they love them. There’s a challenge in there, and kids just love a challenge. Their brains are tuned to focus on new puzzles to solve, whereas we have brains that have typically stopped trying to make sense of new challenges, and do not question the things we see. For them, they see a new thing, and want to learn it. But, you should do the same, and not lose that child-like investigation of our world.

One thing that amazes me, is that when you give kids ciphers, you often don’t have to tell them how to solve it, they will work it out for themselves. While we have been taught method, they just use the power of their brain to find new ways of doing things. In fact, I make a point in not telling kids a method of cracking a cipher, as they will often develop their own way. When you ask them how the solved something, the answer is often “I don’t quite know, but I did this and that!”, and that is sheer intelligence.

Go go and learn and exercise the most amazing prize you have been given … your brain! So let’s do a hop, a skip, and a jump!

With the Skip Cipher we jump a given number of characters. For example, if we take a message of ‘Hello’, and jump two characters at a time we get ‘Hloel’. If we have a skip of 3, then: