Define and discover skills

Author’s names: Holze and Gutierrez

Last classes we've working in pairs in Khan Academy with a game but we've been struggling with these game and we still are, because as you see in the pictures below, you can't understand what it says at first sight. Turns out these pieces of papers are ciphered with different kinds of cipher methods. So we have 1 big problem here:

We don't know how to decipher them 

At starters it was even hard to define what our problem was; to define it and get to the conclusion of what our principal problem is we went to different steps, for example we did brainstormings to try to define what method could we use to resolve the clues or searching for information that could help us find the right method.

First clue:

Defintion: We went trough the letters over and over (rephrasing it) trying to understand what it says or how could we decipher it and it doesn't even have periods or comas so we didn't even know if they were sentences or a text like a letter. Then we research all over Khan Academy for information that could help us and we found the "Caesar Cipher". The information they gave us about these method stop us for jumping to conclusions and helped us to solve it faster.

Discover: We took notes about the videos we saw and the information we read about the Caesar Cipher and started to search for answers. After a while we found something like a Translator (which is in the one in the photo of the G-Drawing board up here) and that gave us finally the solution of the clue.

Second clue:

Definition: When we saw this for the first time, we already knew that it was ciphered because of the first one, so we thought it was also with the "Caesar Cipher" so we tried it and it didn't work so we had to go all over the brainstorming and searching for information thing and we found it was a different method called: "Polyalphabetic cipher". We researched all the information we could so we could solve it as fast as possible and we kinda did.

Discover: This time there isn't anything like a translator (like in clue 1) so it was harder because we did letter by letter, the data that Khan Academy gave us and the information we looked in other webpages was really helpful and it took us a really long time but we finally got to the conclusion and deciphered the message. 

Third clue:

Defintion: We didn't jumped to conclusions this time and instead we started to research the information that Khan Academy gave us and then searching in other pages because we didn't understand well the info in Khan Academy and we started to take notes and then connect them all and finally got to understand how the "Visual Telegraphs" work.

Discover: Thanks to the notes we took, we were able to know what's more important and in this case, the basic letters like the vocals so the words would be more easy to decipher and so we got to the conclusion, although we have to admit it look us some time.

Fourth clue:

Definition: This clue is a little different than the other ones, and more difficult. For this one you have not one problem but two: you don't know what it says (as in clues 1, 2 and 3) and you don't know the different method to get to the final solution and you have to get to know all the methods and concepts before taking the next step, nothing like the fist three clues where you only have to learn one method. For this you have to go all over the discovery of the clues (when you first found them) and for this we needed a little help of Khan Academy because we couldn't remember all the steps we made exactly as we made then you need also to remember the "binary numbers", which we remembered almost nothing of so we had to research for information to get to the next step but we "crushed" with the "Frequency Fingerprint Exploration" which at first looks kinda easy but believe it isn't easy and what we thought was our last step is called: "XOR bitwise operation" which actually consists in 5 topics: 

-"The Ultimate Shift Cipher"

-"Encrypting Colors"

-"Application of Random Shifts"

-"AND"

-"OR"

-"XOR"

So we had to learn all these different concepts, and they all basically explain how to decipher a code with different mixes of colors and numbers.

Discover: We took hours and hours learning this concepts, taking note, seeing videos and even making something like mind-maps and  brainstormings to figure this clue out and after a few days of homeworking (besides of in class) we got the final solution.