Necessity is the mother of kludge

[owlectomy]

For the longest time I've been meaning to do a code program at the library. I wanted an activity somewhere on the scale between "lemon juice invisible ink" (which we will do, natch) and "letter frequency analysis," so I settled on doing decoder wheels.

My first try was to use a compass and a protractor to construct decoder wheels. Well, if you want to squeeze 26 letters into 360 degrees, each one will need to be 13.84 degrees, and it turns out it's a bit hard to get an angle that precise by hand. I tried to get it as close as I could, but there was still enough of a discrepancy that I felt uneasy. Close enough for government work, right? But then the copier decided to stop working. So I thought, I could go home and use my scanner and printer instead. And then I thought, if I'm going home anyway I can use a graphics program and do it, can't I?

There may well be a way to use GIMP to construct a circle divided precisely into 26 segments, but if there is, I can't find it.

And then I realized something.

I was making a pie chart.

I could just use Excel!

Except that Excel decided to throw a fit when I was trying to format it the way I wanted to print it, so I ended up copy-pasting to Word, and then copy-pasting to Publisher, and finally I got it the way I wanted it.

I was really proud of myself.

It was somewhat after this that I realized that it's actually pretty easy to find decoder wheel templates online. [PDF.]

Comments

[meaghansketch]

When I was doing tutoring, I did letter frequency analysis with my 14-year old tutee, so don't necessarily count that out for the future!

(She was super-excited that she could decode secret codes!)

I would have done this for you but I guess downloading the PDFs would have been easier.

[owlectomy]

It was a thing where I thought doing it by hand would be super easy so I left it till the last minute and then I didn't want to bug you.

I would like to introduce the veeeery basics of frequency analysis, but it depends on who I get!

[oyceter]

Haha, halfway through I was thinking "Oh! You could add 0-9 to make it 36 characters which splits nicely into 10 degrees each!"

...but premade templates are always the best answer!

[owlectomy]

That's a good idea, and would have saved me some frustration! But I don't know that I'd have gotten a level of precision I'd have been happy with anyway, doing it by hand. Computers are better than humans at that sort of thing!