The challenge is a code breaking competition, written for secondary and sixth form students. The competition runs over 10 weeks, with two challenges per week varying from simple substitution ciphers to Vigenere ciphers, Caesar ciphers, Affine ciphers and more!  It attracts a large number of individual and team entries from the UK and internationally and is sponsored by GCHQ, Trinity College Cambridge and Netcraft with four coveted prizes of £1,000 offered to the four top scorers.

Team “Golden Retriever”, led by Lucille (team captain), Corinne and Carissa, attended a prize ceremony at Bletchley Park on Wednesday 28 February.  The students were able to tour Bletchley Park and were invited to a private winners' lunch with the sponsors of the competition.  They also heard some fascinating talks by leading Mathematicians and GCHQ and received their awards.

We were delighted to win a Gold Medal at the National Cipher Competition after a tense 10 weeks of cracking some very difficult codes and ciphers.  The ceremony day at Bletchley Park was amazing and being part of where the history of British codemaking and codebreaking took place was a great honour. 

Lucille