Secret Codes by Virginia Vaughan, Tocaro Blue

February 21, 2026

February Science Saturday was about secret codes and cryptography. Students encoded and decoded messages using techniques like the Pigpen cipher and the Caesar Cipher. They learned how the Caesar Cipher was finally broken after hundreds of years using frequency analysis (how often each letter appears in text in a given language). For the final activity, students in the younger group decoded a series of messages using the book cypher. The older students learned about the enigma code.