Workshop: This workshop challenges your team with an exercise to decipher coded messages in a set amount of time. Although the codes in the exercise are not nearly as difficult as the German Enigma or Japanese Purple codes, the messages are authentic and were ones decoded during the Second World War. In the exercise, you are competing against the clock and  against other teams. Excelling at this exercise requires a breadth of talents: mathematics, history, foreign languages

Historical Background: During the Second World War, the U.S. was inundated with coded radio messages that the military had intercepted and needed decoding. With so many men called to service to Europe and the Pacific, both the Army and Navy were desperate for others who could help decode those messages. To address that need, the military recruited 21,000 civilians, most of them women. These recruits had diverse backgrounds, from mathematics to foreign languages. Moreover, these recruits learned quickly to work in teams. Estimates were that the successes of the codebreaking team reduced the length of the war by two years. 

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