This year, I got to teach a Number Theory course during our Short Term, and for this blog post I want to write a bit about the experience, but mostly about the final project I gave my students, which was a cryptographic scavenger hunt. Before I begin, however, I should explain more about Bates. The academic year here consists of two twelve-week semesters (Fall and Winter) and one five-week Spring term. During the Short Terms (of which the students have to take at least two), students only take one course. This gives departments the opportunity of immersing their students in a particular topic. In the math department, for example, this is the term where we teach our intro to proofs class (a requirement for the major), affectionately known as Math Camp (or Math Boot Camp depending on who you ask). Other departments do a similar “methods” or “basics for the major” class, like History (known as History Hell), and Political Science (known as Politics Hell or Political Prison). As you can imagine, students have mixed feelings about these intense courses. Immersion is not always fun, especially if it means you are in class five hours a day, five days a week, writing and presenting proofs. I actually do think these courses work very well, and that students get a lot out of them (and I think going through the experience brings them closer together and helps with building the sense of community I’ve mentioned in previous posts).<\/p>\n
Not all courses taught during Short Term are “basics” courses, however. This is also a great time to teach electives. We change ours from year to year (depending on who teaches it). The most popular one in recent years has been the Mathematics of Roller Coasters class, which even has a field trip on the last week of class. This year it was my turn, so I chose Number Theory (my area of expertise). I was pretty sure I wanted to run it very inquiry based, with group work, class presentations, and experimentation, and for the latter I wanted to use a computational component (they learned a bit of Sage<\/a>). I also decided I would not give them exams, but rather weekly projects, similar in difficulty to a take-home exam but with the possibility of working together. I knew I wanted to finish with some Cryptography applications, since that is always very exciting to the students, and the issue was deciding what to give them as their final project. This is how I arrived at the Cryptography scavenger hunt idea.<\/p>\n Of course, for a while it was just an abstract “wouldn’t if be fun” kind of idea. I did a little research online and actually found a really great article<\/a> by Judy and Eric Holdener describing their experience doing this at Kenyon College. It gave me a starting point, and most importantly, an idea of the timing for the activity. They had their students collect three clues and then decrypt a ciphertext which sent them to a library book, and the students finished in about 45 minutes. It also gave me the idea of giving the different teams the clues in different orders, so they wouldn’t converge on the same place at once. Since my class time was three hours, I decided to double their number of clues. We also learned RSA<\/a> and ElGamal<\/a> in class, so I had them use the two different cryptosystems. The last piece of my planning puzzle was inspired by one of my colleagues, Stephanie Kelley-Romano<\/a>, from the Rhetoric department, who teaches a Short Term class in conspiracy theories. She does a “find the clues and bring down the conspiracy” activity in the last week of her class, and like her, I decided I would be kidnapped, and my students would rescue me using what they learned in our class.<\/p>\n