Cryptographic Puzzles
📋 What it is
A cipher hides a message by a letter-swap rule; finding the rule (the key) decodes it.
🗣️ Coach says
Some riddles are coded. The Caesar cipher shifts each letter a fixed amount (A→D). To solve, find the shift and slide every letter back. The rule IS the key — once you have it, the whole message unlocks.
🧠 Memory hook
Find the shift, slide every letter back. The rule is the key.
😲 Whoa!
Julius Caesar used a shift cipher 2,000 years ago; the same swap-the-letters idea, made far stronger, still protects your messages online today.
✅ Quick check: With a Caesar shift of 1 (A→B), decode “IFMMP”.
Say your answer out loud first — then reveal.
“HELLO” — shift each letter back by 1: I→H, F→E, M→L, M→L, P→O.
Reversing the known shift decodes each letter exactly.
🧪 Try it! (2 minutes)
Write your name with a shift-of-2 cipher and have a friend decode it using the rule you give them.