Redmond Weekly Review (5/22/25)

Hey Hawks! We are back this week after a short break, and today, we explored ciphers and cryptography! We began with a brief introduction to cryptography and its usage today. Then we learned about 3 different types of ciphers: the Caesar Cipher, the Substitution Cipher, and the Playfair Cipher. It took a little practice (especially with the harder Playfair Cipher) for them to fully understand, but they rose up to the challenge and gained a solid understanding of how each works. To end things off, we put the new skills to the test with a fun challenge! They were given 5 encrypted codes, each using one of the ciphers we just learned. The task was the decode the messages to reveal a riddle. While we ran out of time for them to fully finish the activity, they all made great progress on the codes, solving 2-3 of them! Overall, they demonstrated great critical thinking skills and had fun solving the codes, some wanting to finish the activity at home!