Vacation Bible School
Crack the code
Julius Caesar created one of the earliest uses of cryptography. He needed a way to communicate to his troops without the messages being intercepted by the enemy. His method, now known as the "Caesar Cipher," substitutes one letter for another. Each letter is exchanged by a letter a certain number of places forward through the alphabet. For example, a rotation of 1 place would trade an A for a B, a B for a C and so forth through the alphabet. Caesar could encode a message and sent it to his generals in the field. Even if the enemy intercepted the message, they would be unable to read the text. They would probably assume the message was some strange unknown language. All the general needed was to know how many letters to rotate the alphabet and he could read the message. Since the English alphabet has 26 characters, a rotation of 13 can be used to either encrypt or decrypt the same message. "Return to Rome" would become "ERGHEA GB EBZR."
With a little head scratching, most people can crack the code. It makes for a fun puzzle. Potential sleuths for this years VBS at Lakeshore Baptist Church will receive a secret message from headquarters. Decoding the mystery text will reveal an invitation to join in on "The Great Kingdom Caper." I have written a program to make it easy to cipher any message into the Caesar Cipher rot13 format. I'm including it on our web site for other churches to use however they see fit. Simply enter any text into the form below.