Codebreaking at PRINT

A group of Waynflete faculty, the staff from Print: A Bookstore, and a group of eager elementary and middle school students enjoyed an afternoon of coding activities together. The book Code Girls: The True Story of the American Women Who Secretly Broke Codes in World War II served as the catalyst for this event. “Coding is something that captures all kinds of minds—the artist, the mathematician, the scientist, the historian, the engineer,” said Lower School Director Anne Hopkins. “There was something for everyone at this event.”

Students engaged in making cipher wheels, coding Bee-Bot robots, beading binary bracelets, and ciphering and deciphering codes for one another. PRINT’s Stephanie Heinz created a coded scavenger hunt that led children around the store and exposed them to a variety of fiction and non-fiction books that incorporate codes, ciphers, and codebreakers in the stories and activities.