Blue Spark Foundation

BlueSpark supported the National Cipher Challenge which is a unique competition run annually by The University of Southampton. Over 5000 school students of all abilities from across the UK took part in the latest Challenge to break codes and ciphers in the fastest time possible time using skills acquired in their maths and computing lessons. The competition website provides a library of resources, a platform for home and school activities and an active forum for a community of young codebreakers. The twitter account for the Challenge allows teachers to share the joy and intensity of some of the young codebreakers as they work to find the crucial weakness of a cipher and to uncover the next stage of the story hidden in the coded messages. The competition stretches the most able and inspires others who discover a love of mathematics that they did not know they had !