This activity incorporates a lesson on online safety with a whole-class review of astronomy.  Students will review what is personal vs public information and the dangers of posting private information online.  Then they will go around the room to examine astronomy posters.  They’ll be hunting for personal details that WOULD NOT be safe for an individual to include in a public forum, like posters or online.  They’ll also be looking for key ideas that they covered during their astronomy course.

This activity is from the Cyber.org website and covers the topic of the German Enigma Encryption machine that was used during World War II. Students will learn about how the Enigma machine worked and the process it used to encrypt messages. Students will be able to create their own Enigma machine using a normal size Pringles can and the activity sheet in PDF format. This is a great way to teach the concepts of encryption and a low cost way to give students a hands on approach to encrypting and decrypting messages.Ideas on how to use this activity would be to give the students a message to encrypt using their Pringles can Enigma machine or having students send an encrypted message to a classmate with the encryption key and have that student decrypt the message. To show the power of this type of encryption you can have other students try to decrypt the message without the key so they can see how difficult it would have been to crack the code during World War II.Link to the Cyber.org website for this activity