Museum awarded in ‘Sybilla’ Competition

The results of the 2015 ‘Sybilla’ Competition for the Museum Event of the Year were announced on 23 May 2016 at the Grand Theatre — National Opera. We are pleased to inform that our Museum was awarded in the Education category for the ‘Secrets of the Enigma’ workshops — a project prepared and conducted by Mateusz Jasik from our education department.

The workshops were organised for students of upper secondary schools in Gdańsk, with the number of participants amounting to 180. The 40-minute workshops were free of charge and held on school premises.
We also carried out a modified version of the workshops during field historical events organised or co-organised by our Museum, with the number of participants estimated at 600.
The topics discussed during the workshops cover the breaking of the code of the German Enigma coding machine by Polish mathematicians and how that affected the course of the history of the Second World War. The workshops supplement and develop the information from the history syllabus. The projects’ uniqueness consists in combining a presentation of historical background with solving cryptographic puzzles using cyphers from different eras.
The teaching aids prepared especially for this project include models of the coding machine with rotors, which allow students to code and decode messages independently, as well as copies and simulators of the Enigma as well as models of the rotors, which aid comprehension of the coding mechanisms used in the machine.