Need help reading this page?

Students from Harrow College have made the annual visit to the heart of Britian's wartime code-breaking effort.

AS Maths and BTEC IT students attended the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, on Thursday 19 June.

The students were given a tour of the site, its museum, as well as shown the Enigma machine, which was used during the Second World War to encipher and decipher secret messages and helped shorten the war by two years.

As part of the tour the students took part in a talk which gave an insight into the mathematical aspects of the Enigma machine, as well as take part in a giant chess game to illustrate the need to think logically and recognise patterns as a means to decode messages.

Student Amadeusz Sobczynski said that the visit had given him a greater understanding of the war effort.

"What was most interesting for me was discovering the way a host of nations, including in particular Poland, went about revealing the secrets of the Enigma machine to help shorten the war. We saw reconstructions of, arguably, the two most important machines in decoding secret messages, the Bombe and the Colossus, and I was astonished by their complexity. They are physical proof of how much hard work the decoders from Bletchley Park had to do."

Bletchley Park, which had in recent years been left to fall into decay, was re-opened this month following a restoration project funded by the National Lottery, Google and internet security firm McAfee.