Finish This Book: Examine Evidence

I’ve been really looking forward to sharing this page, though now that I’ve come to it I’ve realised that I can’t actually share too much because I don’t want to spoil the activity for anyone else who is working their way through Finish This Book.

I couldn’t help but look forward to the Evidence Examination page (even though the instructions tell you not to skip ahead, sometimes I can’t help but take a peek at the next couple of pages to come). This page has a picture of a postcard on it and something that is obviously a code that needs to be broken. There’s even a ‘key letter’ in the postage stamp box. This one would be easy.

Or so I thought!

That’s my notes as I tried to figure out what the code was. As you can see, following the key letter didn’t actually get me very far.

Suffice to say, I figured out from the format of the code that it was probably a website address, even though AAA just didn’t convert to WWW no matter what I tried (and when I did convert it to WWW it just created a nonsense string of gibberish).

So I worked backwards and wound up on a website with this logo:

Picture taken from the mysterious website address in the code.

Which took me to a letter from Keri Smith, congratulating me on my sleuthing skills. It also told me that some of the mistakes, like those I encountered in the Code Cracking activity, were intentional and part of the test.

I think so far this has been one of my favourite activities in this book. I’m really hoping that there are some more like it in the future. It’s fun having to follow clues onto the internet to solve riddles and mysteries. This page definitely spurred me on to play with this book some more.