Find Ms. Tran's Cow!

Project Description:

Before this project, we watched a video on Caesar Ciphers, which are used to encrypt text. There are one-digit keys and multi-digit. 1-digit keys mean that you only have one number, and you move every letter in the alphabet up that much (for instance, ABC with a key 4 would be EFG). However, multi-digit keys have more than one number, so you move each letter in the text up with its respective number in the key (for instance, ABC with key 534 would be FEG). Then, we coded the decryption and encryption program on Google Colab. This will come useful, because...

Oh no! Ms. Tran's cow has gone missing! To find it, we have to decode multiple Caesar Ciphers which when deciphered, give you clues to where the cow is. We will recieve:

• 5 messages

• A program we made to decrypt them

• A new clue after each one we decipher.

Procedure:

Clue One:

Our first clue was "Hmaly zllpun aol ovvm wypuaz vu aol mvvaihss mplsk, Tz. Ayhu ruvdz oly jvd ohz nvul tpzzpun! Zol pz whupjrpun! Jhu fvb olsw nla aol jvd ihjr?" Plugging this into a simple function that decrypts it assuming there is one number every letter follows gave us: "After seeing the hoof prints on the football field, Ms. Tran knows that her cow has gone missing! She is panicking! Can you help get the cow back?"

Clue Two:

Our next clue was "Knltncc bjrm bqn bjf SQ trmb qjerwp odw frcq cqn lxf jwm njcrwp vrwc ljwmrnb cxpncqna wnja cqn Ldn Zdjm.zvtl QO rpkz lhapun tpua jhukf ulhy aol Jbl Xbhk." Decrypting gives us: "Beckett said she saw JH kids having fun with the cow and eating mint candies together near the Cue Quadsome JH kids eating mint candy near the Cue Quad."

Clue Three:

Our next clue was "Pibbqm umvbqwvml ammqvo i jzwsmv riz wn uqvb kivlqma qv bpm wnnqkm epmv apm bzqml bw omb wvm nwz pmzamtn." Decrypting gives us: "Hattie mentioned seeing a broken jar of mint candies in the office when she tried to get one for herself."

Clue Four:

Our next clue was "Bjkarwj oxdwm j vrwc fajyyna wnja cqn Vdayqh yjcrx frcq j blarkkunm wxcn: ljuu vn jc 650806" Decrypting gives us: "Sabrina found a mint wrapper near the Murphy patio with a scribbled note: call me at 650806"

Clue Five:

Our final clue was "Zme cud jaupe tnl kjtiy jgy eqoqe txfrvp yo gka pry fivuyrbn xnicq. Vx tnm yaxtn miu; on fgqkmd ax Vy. Aatjqmi’x wflplm zt oez liwjd, tnlw qasg oaa erzm bhk SP qnda.". We attempted putting it in with a one-digit key, but our outputs didn't have anything understandable. We realised the 650806 was a key, and put that into a multi-digit key decryption program. Our intial output was "The cox jsujy tfl eetay dby ekile trzmvh si gca jmy fcppyjbh snack. Vp nhh qarni eio; of zalked us Ny. Valjkgd’p qzgpdm to get giojx, tflq lakg iva elth the NP qhxv." The word "cox" is similar to cow, so we added an extra number in our code that would get cow: 7. That led us to get: "The cow eampy nil kdmct bgs yloie mrarnp ri gca ilt xipnsmbf rgcxq. Pq one stron mcn; of zzkfmv uq Qy. Utneqei’q rfdpff ut oys giojx, ondw jung out zrrm ubf KP jhya." We then realized that it was a 10-digit key, as it said "call me at", and phone numbers have 10 digits. Additionally, we got "Qy. Utneqei'q", which we realized was "Ms. Sanchez". Using that, we plugged in the clue 6508067991, with "99" as a placeholder. Turns out that the 99 was useful, even though the last 1 was wrong! We got: "The cow azoke the bindy jar vpile tryimo to get gqs favorism snack. Mw one stokm him; he ealked to Us. Sanchdh’s officd to get czvdy, then pung out vqth the JG kids."  We were able to translate this, even though it wasn't spelled correctly. Changing a few things in our key from here, we got the key 6508067989, which gave us "The cow broke the candy jar while trying to get his favorite snack. No one stole him; he walked to Ms. Sanchez’s office to get candy, then hung out with the JH kids." We solved it!

Reflection:

S: I think that we had a good strength as a team, as we worked together to remember a few numbers and values that otherwise we wouldn't have been able too. We worked productively and eventually solved it.

O: If we had the opportunity, we may have tried to solve it in a faster way, or notice the phone number clue earlier.

U: We learned about how to use logical and contextual thinking to figure out the key that we needed, even if that was all we had

L: Some of the limitations that we had were the time and amount of clues. Additionally, just trying to figure out the last 4 numbers by brute-forcing it on a program would take a while, as there are 10,000 combinations. 

WISCR: I think that we hit the I and R is WISCR. We hit the I because we were thinking critically throughout the project while trying to find out the key. We got the R because we were respectful to each other, even when we didn't solve it.