Cool Codes for Kids: The Caesar Shift

Dan Metcalf is the author of Codebusters, an adventure book for 8-12 year olds from Bloomsbury Publishing. He's also a (very) amateur codebreaker! Back in ancient rome, the emporer Julius Ceasar needed a way of disguising his messages to his generals who were off at war. He came up with this nifty little code, known as the Caesar shift (Isn't it weird that it had the same name as him???) To write the code down, you just take the letters of your word and hop two places ahead in the alphabet. So A becomes C, B becomes D, and so on. A word like BANANAS becomes DCPCPCU. So to decode the message you just take the message which looks like gobbledegook, and replace each letter with the one two places ahead of it in the alphabet. So this word: EQFGDWUVGTU Becomes: CODEBUSTERS You can jump any amount of places in the alphabet of course, which means there are 26 different versions. Have a go!