This lesson is designed to teach students basic encryption using the Caesar cipher method. This is a simple letter shift cipher that takes a plaintext message and encrypts it into cipher text by shifting each letter of the message by a value between 1 and 25 (1 less than the total number of letters in the English alphabet). This technique was used by Julius Caesar to encrypt messages by shifting each letter of the message by 3 letters. The message would be decrypted by taking each letter and shifting back 3 letters to reveal the plaintext message.

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