In this task, students assume the role of a student preparing an application to the CIA Undergraduate Internship Program. In the application, they are asked to answer the following scenario in a 2-3 page paper: "A terrorist organization has taken control of the Bay Area power grid. They are communicating in code and a recent transmission has been intercepted by the CIA. Your job is to crack the code and deliver the message encoded to the local CIA director."
Students write a mathematical analysis paper describing how they encode and decode messages. Then students must encode the message using both the shift cipher and matrix method and describe what method would be best given time constraints, vulnerability, and ease of decoding.
Note: This task is not accompanied by a rubric. We suggest teachers/schools select an appropriate rubric from this resource bank or your school/district materials.
