This term, Year 7 boys have been busy saving the world (by protecting your bank accounts) through a project-based learning challenge designed and run by the Newington Mathematics Department.

It all began when boys received notice that the International Cyber criminal gang known as “Carbanak” had hacked into the accounts of several Australian financial institutions in an attempt to steal the family inheritance. In response, students were being called into action to help intercept Carbanak’s email communication and crack coded messages.

In the lead up to the biggest counter-offensive strategy known to Newington students, boys were divided into code hacker groups for training. Those who successfully passed their training would then be introduced into an elite crew who would take part in a civilian-based ‘Hackathon’ hosted in the Tupou College Centre on Tuesday, 8 August.

Originally inspired by Alan Turing’s story in The Imitation Game, the aim of the Year 7 Hackathon was to motivate boys to learn and practice algebra, patterns and computation with integers in a competitive team-based game environment. The Hackathon also helped hone the boys’ skills in investigation, collaboration, inquiry and reflection – all significant aspects of what it means to be a Newington Learner (under the Newington Learning and Teaching Framework).

Throughout the challenge, boys reflected on their progress on individual blogs while learning and researching different kinds of codes and cyphers before they took a crack at developing their own.

“I never knew how long codes had been around for before starting this project. The range of codes has intrigued me to learn more about them and their history. I hope I persevere with this code topic and maybe have an involvement with it when I’m older”, said one Year 7 boy in Mr Brian McCarthy’s class (7RMC).

The group component of the project saw boys work in their designated teams to crack five codes of varying difficulty. While doing this, the boys were given a time limit and a soundtrack to help motivate them – the Mission Impossible theme song!

“What I found great about being in a group was that if I didn’t quite understand something I could get help from a group member” said one Year 7 boy from the same class.

“A good example of this was when we were cracking the practice codes and I didn’t understand how skip codes work, so I asked a member of my group and they helped me figure it out right away, which helped me for the rest of the activity”, he said.

The final Hackathon was hosted at lunchtime and was attended by more than 100 boys. Newington ICT generously donated their time and expertise to help set up a web interface for boys to hack into and login details were sent to the boys through an encrypted email. The first 10 groups who successfully hacked into Carbanak’s system received a prize. But, by then, almost everyone already had a taste for the infectious thrill of cracking codes to save the world.

Mr Doug Vass
Head of Mathematics