Crack the Binary Code activity

“Crack the Binary Code” is a fantastic way to introduce binary coding to your students without going into too much difficult details. It’s a popular activity, not only for tech teachers. Because of its easy explanation and individual type of work (each students works on their own paper), it’s also a great activity for subs and even for parents at home, trying to find something interesting for their child to do in the next 30 minutes.

How do you do the activity?

The activity is more of a puzzle, kind of looks like deciphering some kind of code using a keys table. Students use the binary code key table provided on each (or on a separate) page to decode a word and solve a riddle or joke or sentence that is already coded. The binary codes table that I mention is basically the ASCII table of the letters from the alphabet – an 8 bit sequence of 1s and 0s for each letter. Here is the one that I use in my activities:

How to make your own “Crack the binary code” activity?

First of all, pick a topic. It could be Summer, Back to school, St. Patrick’s day, or something like computer viruses, computer history etc. Second, pick the words or phrases or sentences that you will be coding.

Let’s say you pick the word “ant”. Grab the first letter “a” and check its binary code in the table. It is 01100001, write that down, below an empty space or some symbol. As you will see a bit below on the picture, I use the “_____” for empty fillable space, and below I add the binary code of the letter. Next, grab the second letter, which is “n”. Look for its code, write that down and so on, until you are done with each letter and the word is complete.

Here is an example. I created a Summer themed crack the binary code activity for my students, Click here to go and check it out or purchase it. It includes jokes and riddles. One of them is “Where do sheep go on vacation in the Summer?”. After using the codes table, you decipher the words and the answer is “the baa-hamas” ha-ha 🙂 I created a Power Point presentation and on each slide I added one riddle or joke, the ciphered word and the ASCII codes table. I call each slide “a card” because you can print and laminate them before giving them to the students. Here is how it all looks like:

I also always include a student handout with a brief explanation on what binary is, just so the students know what they are doing and not just aimlessly matching numbers and letters.

It’s an easy and fun activity, perfect for tech teachers, subs, anyone actually. I even use such puzzles as sudoku sometimes – just to keep my brain exercised and in shape 🙂

If you don’t feel like creating everything from scratch, if you want your precious free time but you still want to do this activity with your students (or hand it to your sub to use when you are gone), you can always go to my TpT store and purchase a whole bunch of these “Crack the binary code” activities with different themes. Here is a list of all I’ve done so far (I will be adding more new ones soon), with links: