Your Goal
Complete the blue island activity, and demonstrate your understanding of communication security and encryption.
🌐 Why does this matter?
This island is focused on the successful transmission (sending) of messages to other people, and avoiding others from intercepting those messages. For example, if a teacher wanted to send an email about a student's assessment results — that would not be great if other students could read it too!
Class Discussion Questions
How would you describe the island? What does the laser represent?
What are the different categories of people represented on this island?
Click each colour to reveal who they represent!
Should you include your full name or a shortened / more secretive version of your name? Why?
Why do people have gamer tags?
What is the deal with the purple mirrors, and the levels where you can't actually move (but only press the spacebar)?
We can communicate in lots of different ways, using electricity, sound, light, and radio/microwaves (various forms of ENERGY). Arrange these examples into the 4 categories:
Talking · WiFi · Text · Fibre Optics · Ethernet Cables · Images · Music (transmission) · Music (listening) · Satellites
⚡ Electricity
🔊 Sound
💡 Light
📡 Radio/Microwaves
Submit Your Certificate
Once you've completed the island, select "Claim Certificate". Be careful to enter your name (but simplified — we don't want to give too much information away!), as you'll have to redo the entire island if you make a mistake.
What is Encryption?
🔐 Click the padlock to watch the encryption explainer video!
• An individual's public and private keys are not the same, but they work in partnership (due to some complicated maths!).
• A message encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with the matching private key.
• Look at the URL of a secure webpage — notice the padlock symbol? This tells you that public key encryption is protecting sensitive information on that platform.
• Try watching the video again after the class explanation — does it make a little more sense the second time?
Class Activity: Encryption Challenge
Consider the design of the Internet we use today — data travels along multiple paths (packets), so why is it critical that those packets are encrypted?
The word "digital" would be encrypted into "wbzbmte".
Using the wheel below, how would you write the word "tech"?
A good method will be easy for your team to encrypt and decrypt, but difficult for someone else to figure out.
They write the encrypted message (cipher text) onto 2 pieces of paper, following their team's encryption system.
One copy goes to the competing group (the interceptors/hackers), one stays with the original team. The challenge: which team can decrypt the message first? If you crack the other team's message, don't call it out — that gives away secret information!
🎯 The first team to hack the other team's message also wins!
