In May, Sidcot School made their first ever History and Maths trip to Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes to visit the scenes of Britain’s great WWII code breakers. Year 9 students were given a tour of the grounds, with an idea of how war time life felt for those who worked there. There were replicas of the machines used for breaking the German Enigma code, which played a key part in the development and evolution of computers.
The students also spent time cracking codes themselves, using Caesar Cipher and code wheels, and then moved on to one of the highlights of the day. There are only a few actual Enigma machines left in existence, but they were superbly made machines which work as well as they ever did. So it was a real privilege for us to actually use one of the devices to encode and decode a message, resetting the code wheels just as it was done during the war.
A quote from one of the students: “I thought Bletchley Park was a really good experience and I really enjoyed it. I think the journey was long but do-able. The talk on enigma was very interesting and nice that we got involved. Thank you for taking us.” Martha Wallis.
It was a really enjoyable and stimulating day out, which we hope to repeat in the future.