Success for Year 9 Mathematicians

A team of Year 9’s came 3rd in the Alan Turing Cryptography Competition and have now been invited to the results ceremony in Manchester.

Now in its seventh year, the Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is aimed at secondary school children, teams register online and then each week a new cipher to solve is released. Teams must work together as quickly as possible to solve the problem and enter their results online, the quicker it is done, the higher you rank on the leaderboard.

Cryptographical techniques are used everywhere in modern everyday life. For example, Whatsapp and many similar programmes use encryption to prevent eavesdropping, many websites use encryption to process credit card payments securely, and banks use it so that people can safely do their internet banking at home.

Here is one example from the first week, as you can see, they don’t give you much to work with.

We had teams competing from Years 7, 8 and 9, who all ranked in the top 70 teams nationally. This is an great achievement for our students considering over 1000 teams from all over the country signed up and submitted entries. All the cipher decoding was done in students own time, with teams meeting up in lunchtimes and afterschool.

Our team of Year 9’s the ‘MadSquirrels’ placed 3rd overall, a very impressive result, massive well done to Annelie, Lara, Juliet and Alice, who will be travelling to Manchester for two days to attend the results ceremony as well as a code breaking day.

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Owned by: RCE | Last Published: 19/04/2018 12:34:25 | Next Update: N/A