Full STEAM Ahead

For a long time, I have wanted to create a treasure hunt that is less ephemeral than newsprint or a digital file or, even a human life. I am excited to share that the “University of Brattleboro’s” first permanent installation will be a treasure code that is going up on the exterior wall of the southern side of 83 Main Street. With some luck and good planning, these treasure hunt panels will continue to give pleasure to people, long after my wife Cynthia Parker-Houghton and I are gone.

Like all of the treasure hunts that we create, this is a “perpetual treasure hunt,” which means that anyone seeking the treasure needs to bring a treasure with them to replace the one that they are going out to find. Very affordable treasures of all natural materials are available in Brattleboro at Twice Upon A Time and Beadniks, both of which are on Main Street, or at Experienced Goods thrift store, on Flat Street.

If you shop at the thrift store, you also get the pleasure of knowing your money will be used to help people living in our community. The same can be said for More Than A Thrift Store, in Keene.

We choose to use a cryptogram message to tell people where to look for the treasure we set out. In a cryptogram, each letter of the English alphabet is represented by one number. Cryptograms are a fun way to teach about set theory, and logic, and I have used them in elementary math classes.

For these installations we wanted this first one to be relatively easy to solve, using paper and pencil. We hope to get 10 of these up around town, and to make them progressively harder.

It is possible to solve a cryptogram using apps you can find on your phone or Google. But that’s sort of like having a robot put together a jigsaw puzzle. Neither you nor the robot will get any pleasure out of it.

Our hardest puzzles will use be too difficult for an app to solve. (Believe it or not, even in today’s world of Chat GPT, and other AI, there are still things requiring logic (and intuition) that people do better than computers).

Here is the puzzle that will be going up on the wall in Brattleboro, and as I say, this one is designed to be relatively easy to solve. However, note that we did not set A = 1, B = 2 C = 3 and so on. They are not random, as a quick look at the code will reveal.

Here is the code that will be going up in Brattleboro. (See cryptogram photo).

So, if you don’t use an app, how do you determine what numbers refer to what letters?

One of the first things to look for are is there any one letter words.

The only number that is by itself is “5.” There are only two one letter words in English, “I” and “A.”

You can take a guess as to which it is, and replace every “5” with either an A or an I. This might give you some guesses as to what some two letter words that have a 5 in them, might be.

One thing people do to solve cryptograms is to track the number of times the different letters (or in this case, numbers)

occurs in the coded message. If you consult a chart like of how common all the letters are in a typical piece of English writing, you will see that “E” is the most common letter by far. Does one number occur more frequently than the other numbers in this code I have given you? If so, it is probably E.

Here is a chart of how common all the different letters are in English. https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html

For more instructions on how to solve a cryptogram, you can all find step by step instructions in the story by Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” on wikisource at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Sherlock_Holmes/Chapter_3

Once you crack this code, it will tell you how to find a large glass diamond, on a local trail. You need to be in downtown Brattleboro, for the clues to make any sense. Good Luck! (And please take care hiking on any trail. If there is snow and or ice, be sure to wear spikes on your shoes. Seriously.)

Our real hope, is not simply that these perpetual treasure hunts will outlast us, though that would be great. But even better than that, it would be wonderful if other people also started making these types of hunts. It’s fun to find treasure, and it’s fun to give treasure. And it’s as fun to create a mystery, as it is to solve one. You can do this, and your kids can too.

Rolf Parker-Houghton lives with his wife, Cynthia Houghton, in Brattleboro, Vt., with their son. You can see what they are up to at www.universityofbrattleboro.com. Send comments or questions to booksfromvermont@yahoo, and be sure to put “Fun” in the subject line.