On Thursday 27th April, Prep 6 visited the historic site of Bletchley Park. The day started extremely early for some of us – we left school at 7:30am. Our first stop was the Mansion where we learnt about the history of Bletchley Park before the war. Inside, we were able to see some of the rooms that were used by the workers as they gathered intelligence and information during the war. We were able to see if any people with our surname worked at Bletchley Park and found out that J.R.R Tolkein and Ian Fleming were rumoured to have been employed at Bletchley Park during the war.
Our tour guide took us around the site highlighting some of the most significant parts of the site. He explained how messages were intercepted by women and brought to Bletchley via motorbike. Here they were attempted to be cracked. We saw where Alan Turing and his team worked long hours to crack Enigma.
In the afternoon, we had the chance to crack different codes and we even used a real Enigma machine. It was incredible to see how many different combinations the machine could have – it was an almost impossible task to crack Enigma. There were over 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations! During the session, we also tried to decipher a radio message using Morse Code. The women who intercepted these messages were incredibly skilled and invaluable to the war effort.
We had a fantastic time at Bletchley Park and enjoyed learning about the history of the site as well as understanding how important Maths can be in the real world.
Categories: Prep 6
