Year 12 Students Visit Bletchley Park

NUAST students vist the home of code breaking (Computer Science - 23/06/2022)

Year 12 students visited Bletchley Park this week as part of our enrichment offer.

Students from Computer Science, Maths and History courses visited the 'home of code breaking' to find out what impact Bletchley Park had on bringing WWII to a close.

Bletchley Park is famous for its code breaking efforts during WWII where mathematicians such as Alan Turing worked tirelessly to solve the German Enigma cipher in order to intercept military messages. Most of these insights have only recently come to light as the work done there was carried out in secret. Alan Turing went on to develop the Bombe machine which was a forerunner to the modern computer.

Students had time to explore the many fascinating interactive exhibits around the park including a message intercepting challenge, the park mansion and offices of Alan Turing. They also had a guided tour from a knowledgeable volunteer to the park and capped off the day with a code breaking lesson and a chance to use the Enigma machine itself.

Mr Wood, Head of Computing commented "Bletchley Park holds huge historical importance and is very much a place of significance for anyone interested in Computing. The work done at the park directly fed in to the development of the computers that we use today. It was great to see students applying some of their problem solving skills to solving modern ciphers."

For more information about Bletchley Park, please see the following website: https://bletchleypark.org.uk/