Rooted in Shannon's mathematical theory of communication and the historical context of wartime cryptography, these students chose to examine how the processes of encoding, transmission and decipherment can be illustrated through an immersive, experiential format. Drawing on the figure of Alan Turing and the codebreaking operations conducted at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, they designed an escape game exposition that places Shannon's foundational communication model at the centre of a lived, interactive inquiry into the conditions under which information is produced, distorted and ultimately recovered.
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The students chose to build their project around the universe of Alan Turing, the mathematician whose codebreaking work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War contributed decisively to the Allied victory. Their conceptual anchor was Claude Elwood Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, published in 1948, which describes how a message travels from a source through a noisy channel before reaching its receiver. The students found in wartime cryptography a perfect illustration of this model: the Enigma machine encoded the message, the radio transmission was the noisy channel, and the Bletchley codebreakers were the receivers fighting to restore meaning. In Turing's case specifically, deciphering enemy messages meant extracting strategic information about the opposing camp, a task that proved decisive for the Allied cause. Rather than presenting these ideas through conventional panels, the group chose to make their visitors live them, designing a fully immersive experience in the spirit of an escape game.
The Exhibition Spread across four tables, the exposition followed the journey of "Professor Baker," a fictional Oxford mathematics professor recruited by British Intelligence. Visitors began by listening through headphones to a faux radio chronicle called Spill the Tea, a seemingly innocuous programme about the finest teas of France, within which a hidden message was revealed by bombing sound effects that punctuated specific words, the bombing sounds serving as the interference in Shannon's communication model. The second station presented hand-written sheets explaining the Caesar, Vigenère and Enigma ciphers alongside a hand-painted cardboard model of the Enigma machine. At the third table, visitors decoded a Caesar cipher embedded in a fabricated front page of the Oxford Post, dated 27 April 1941, to retrieve a meeting point and a code name. The final stage placed them inside Bletchley Park itself, where an Enigma-encoded message deciphered using a mobile simulator revealed the date and time of an imminent German attack.
The Exhibition Spread across four tables, the exposition followed the journey of "Professor Baker," a fictional Oxford mathematics professor recruited by British Intelligence. Visitors began by listening through headphones to a faux radio chronicle called Spill the Tea, a seemingly innocuous programme about the finest teas of France, within which a hidden message was revealed by bombing sound effects that punctuated specific words, the bombing sounds serving as the interference in Shannon's communication model. The second station presented hand-written sheets explaining the Caesar, Vigenère and Enigma ciphers alongside a hand-painted cardboard model of the Enigma machine. At the third table, visitors decoded a Caesar cipher embedded in a fabricated front page of the Oxford Post, dated 27 April 1941, to retrieve a meeting point and a code name. The final stage placed them inside Bletchley Park itself, where an Enigma-encoded message deciphered using a mobile simulator revealed the date and time of an imminent German attack.
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All paper supports had been aged by hand using coffee and candlelight, and a red thread ran the full length of the stand from the first stage to the last, serving as both a connecting thread between steps and a decorative element. The group later reflected that ambient noise in the exhibition hall had made the audio stage difficult to follow even with headphones, and that with greater means they would have used a genuine vintage radio with a recorded cassette to better immerse visitors in the world they had created.
