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Year 9 Computer Science - Bletchley Park Visit
Miss Teague sent this report:
On Tuesday, 26 March 68 Year 9 students and 7 members of staff travelled to the historic home of codebreaking in Milton Keynes. On arrival we split into 3 groups and completed range of activities.
Mr Crowley’s group and mine, began with a guided tour (with the very knowledgeable Mark) he took us around the grounds and told us the amazing history and importance of the place we were standing. We visited the iconic mansion, stableyard and Codebreaker’s wall. He included fun facts such as 75% of the workforce were women! The students in our group were very attentive and were keen to deepen their knowledge. He then took us to an immersive cinematic experience exploring Bletchley Park’s secret D-Day role. An impressive explanation as to how the Allies planned the epic operation codenamed Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious landing in history on June 6th 1944.
Our self-guided time was split into 2 half an hour sections. On Mark’s advice we visited Block B an exhibit on Alan Turing, the development of GCHQ and the German Lorenz ciphers. Students were given a booklet to complete and spent this time looking at the exhibits and answering questions. Other groups visited Huts 11A & 11 the home of the Bombe machines, developed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman to speed up the daily search for Enigma cipher keys.
Next was a workshop in personal cyber security. Students were shown how passwords are stored and potentially hacked! A demonstration of a Public Wifi and data interception – stealing credit cards details went down very well with the students. The session then turned towards exploring the technology around strong strong passwords and biometric passwords such as facial recognition. Students left with a new respect for their passwords, practical examples of how to be safer online and the tools to share their knowledge with others.
We then went and visited the shop and had our lunch break in the newly renovated Education Centre before finishing our independent explore of the ground and exhibits. Our groups enjoyed visiting a limited exhibit on Art of Data: making sense of the world exhibit along with the intelligence factory – exploring how Bletchley Park operated at in industrial scale with a multi-skilled workforce of around 9,000.
We all jumped back on the coaches and returned back to school, a great day had by all!
