Carers and Teachers
We know that the current situation is putting everyone under a lot of strain, and we have the utmost respect for all of you who are now having to juggle the multiple responsibilities of child care, work, education and family life.
We hope that for some of you the Cipher Challenge can become part of your routine. It is supposed to be fun, but it may be unfamiliar so we have produced some resources to help.
For those of you who are new to the competition we have put together a page of stories from participants and teachers who taken part in previous competitions. We hope they will give you a flavour of the competition, and an idea of what schools and participants can get out of it. If you have your own story about the competition, do get in touch we would love to hear from you. And if you have questions about it then email us at [email protected] and we will do what we can to help.
The Instructions menu contains links to a number of guides including how to register an account or for a teacher account; joining or setting up a team, and also links to the site FAQ.
It also has information about how to submit an entry, get feedback and download certificates.
The Training and Development page contains a wealth of material about codebreaking and the resources menu links to all the information you need about the challenge. If you want to read about the competition offline we have prepared a short guide which you can download as a pdf at the following link. This is variously referred to as the Trainers’ Manual and the Teacher Pack in various parts of the site, but the two are the same document:
There is a library with suggestions for books you might enjoy, including some recommendations from Anthony Horowitz and the Book Brothers. Many of the books are available for download on Apple Books and on Amazon. Youtube is also full of useful videos on codes and ciphers and we have listed some in the cinema section.
Please feel free to add suggestions for the resources on the forum. (You can register for your own account to post on the forum even if you are not the one taking part.)
If you have any questions please do post them in the forum, or get in touch by email at
Register as a teacher so you can use the bulk registration tool to register multiple teams at once. You will find the teacher password on the cover of the trainer pack cover.