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Find Ms. Tran's Cow
Description:
Ms. Tran's Cow had gone missing and she needs your help to find it. You will decode a series of Caesar-encrypted clues to uncover what happened, who did it, and where the cow is now.
Before the start of this project we coded a caesar cipher encryption and decryption. This cipher works by asigning numbers to letters and shifting these numbers by a specific amount as the key. Decryption works by shifting with the opposite amount.
We then coded one that could use a multiple digit key. We used a list containing the key and each time the program was at a letter, a number on the list was chosen in order and that one would be how much we shift this letter by. This meant that it would be much more complicated to decrypt without a key.
Procedure:
Using what we had coded the class before, we used a for loop for all the possible keys. Because there are 26 letters, theres 26 possible shifts that we could use. Using a for loop from 1 to 27, we had numbers from 1 to 26. We then ran the decryption code 26 time for every shift key using the for loop. This gives us the solution for every shift. Then we simply scroll through the solutions and find the one that makes a sentence to solve the clue. We repeated this for the next four clues.
For the final clue, the technique we used for the first ones didn't work. We considered that it may be a multi-digit key. From a previous clue, clue 4, we got a phone number in the solution:650806... using this number, we got a clue that was barely legible. This showed us that we were on the right track, but just a bit off. Because a phone number has 10 digits usually, we suspected we needed 4 more. We made a code for all the digits from 0 to 9999, which would be all the four digit possibilities for a shift. Then we turned i, which was all four digit numbers into a string. We concatenated this number onto the original. Then we plugged this into the decryption program as the key. We scrolled through all the possibilities until we found the one that matched. Solving the final clue.
Reflection - SOUL
S - Strength of your work
O - Opportunities to improve your project
U - Understanding - what you learned through this project
L - Limitations you encountered in this project
WISCR - choose at least two learning skills that you apply/practice often in this project and explain why you chose these skills.
Reflection:
S: Strength of your work: We understood the code very well so we were able to speed through easily and get the cow first.
O-Opportunities to improve your project: For the first few clues my partner decoded them very fast so I couldn't contribute much until the final clue.
Understanding- what you learned through this project: I learned a lot about lists in this project, as well as caesar cipher encoding and decoding. Using for loops like this was very fun.
L-Limitations you encountered in this project: A big problem is with larger keys that I had to scroll much more to find the solution. Like for the four digit code, even though my code wasnt the most efficient it was good enough, but still gave 10,000 solutions that had to be sifted through. If it was any bigger than the time taken to decode would have been exponentially larger.
WISCR:
We used I-Insightful and Critical thinker to code a new solution for clue five using our understanding and previous clues.
We used C-Clear Communicator, to communicate my solution with my partner and hers with me. This helped us work very efficiently.
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