Day 33: Decyphering Newton

Newton, KS -> Newton, KS 0 mi, 0 ft (except for Ishaq, but he had his own agenda)

After cycling for hours through the plains, fields and general flatness and emptiness the last couple of days, I was excited to exist in civilization for a day. We had a learning festival planned in the Newton Public Library. Newton has a population of around 18k people, all of which I am jealous of, because they have such a cool local library.

We were not there to marvel at the library though, we were there to run some workshops! (Pictures can be found on our instagram btw.) I had some great runs of my Science of Secrets workshop a.k.a. the Ceasar cypher and how to crack it, mostly because we had enough time to do the cracking with a lot of the groups and I got some great questions! One girl also solved the whole worksheet, which was a first.

I suppose we have never actually given a rundown of what our lessons are, so I can briefly walk through mine. It starts with a discussion about how to share secrets (e.g. with your friends, from whispering to texting to hiding messages and sending encoded ones), I might go on a detour to talk about steganography, but ultimately we will settle on cryptography. We learn about the Ceasar cypher, what keys are, what keys make sense for this cypher, how to encode and decode messages. To make life easier and the activity more hands on, the students make their own cyphering tools (instead of using substitution tables). Then, after getting some encryption and decryption practice, they can choose to exchange hidden messages which solidifies the skills or try to hack the cypher (which is more rewarding, but also more challenging). My favourite parts are probably the discussions in the beginning, then trying to figure out the keys and finally the challenges that ultimately lead to (or at the very least allude to) the cracking of all substitution cyphers, which is pretty awesome! Sometimes I get to introduce the factorial and that makes me happy, but I will also settle for understanding the number 25. Point is, it’s pretty great. Halfway through the lesson, we start using a handout, so there is a more structured way to move through the tasks. I sneakily put some further readings at the end of it, in case someone has a boring summer ahead of them.

While I was having fun debugging the struggles of communicating in code, Tian and Ishaq had a different quest – go to Wichata, KS to fix some bike problems. That included getting Joseph some gloves. A simple task… Or so it seems… (tnn, tnnn, tnnnnnnnn)

Here is Ishaq hitting some sleek poses with glove candidates. (sorry Ishaq, these are too good)

Joseph went with the red ones. Equipped with this information Tian and Ishaq then made the purchase and headed to the bus station to drop Ishaq off, so he can visit his mom. On the way there Ishaq was going to put the gloves purchase into Splitwise (our personal purchase splitting app of choice), when he realised he could not find them. Odd… After some digging around the car, he remembered that he had put them on the roof of the car, while securing the bikes on the back. So they hurried back to the store and searched for the glove in the parking lot, but to no avail. Battling the demons of guilt they got another pair of gloves and headed to the bus station. But then on the highway Ishaq noticed a suspicious red item laying alone on the highway – the missing gloves! Of course it being a highway the car had already passed the gloves, so they did a u-turn and then another one, but then they passed the gloves again, so they did some more u-turning until the gloves were acquired. So now we have an extra pair of gloves and the moral of the story is to never give up on the things you lose. (This statement really did not age that well with more stuff going missing… that’s for another blog.)

Back to the main plot, the learning festival went very smoothly. Personally, I think it is the best one yet. Small groups of great, engaged kids with lots of joy and questions, it was a pleasure to spend time with them!

After the kids left we stayed in the library. Charles and Ruth were 3d printing and debugging the printing pens. I was drawing and cutting circles. Tian was eating and making 3d flowers. Joseph gave some well received back massages. Some people visited the nearby cafe and came back raving about the banana muffins and peach chai lattes (which might have taken the top spot in chai rankings or not i don’t know nothing). Sarah did some reading. Ruth started scheming how we can do almost 300 miles in 3 days in Northern Nevada (where there is barely any churches, and too many shrubs). Busy with various tasks, we ended up spending the whole day in the library.

To top it off, our lovely host Janet took us to dinner at a mexican place not even a block away from their home. It was great! I got to try barbacoa and pink lemonade (that was really pink!), Ruth got ramen, which was interesting and did some shenanigans to make her sweet iced tea the right sweetness. Sarah got a huge burrito. I think my braincells at that point were running around without aim, so I got lots of laughs. It was awesome! Thanks Janet and Orvin!

And with that ended our learning festival day. Off to sleep we went! And off to sleep I am going now too!