Spies
and Secret Codes
Elementary School Workshop
OSSO Collective
May 23 — 24, 2024
Before establishing
λLang. as an R&D platform, I was invited to give a workshop at OSSO aimed at elementary school students. Drawing from my research interests, the educational activities I had been developing with the OSSO collective and the goals outlined for Portuguese elementary school curricula, I designed and conducted a series of two one-day workshops entitled "Spies and Secret Codes", focusing on the contextual and, thus, constructional nature of language.
The workshops were rooted in the theme of “espionage” and the “transmission of secret messages,” with the underlying aim of exploring, through games and play, the constructive and contingent nature of systems of meaning and representation. The activities sought to expand upon the collective mechanisms of commitment, negotiation, and inference that form the broader practice of language, emphasizing the foundational importance of context, domain, and data models. Inspired by Goodman and Dewey, the focus was shifted from asking, "What does it mean?" to "When does it mean?".
Although the term 'code' was used in the title to create an engaging and thrilling premise for the participants, the workshop dealt exclusively with ciphers, focusing on syntactic games. The workshop was structured as a treasure hunt, where each stage contained an enigma that revealed the path to the next stage, enciphered using a historical protocol. These protocols — Alphabetical Index, Scytale, Atbash, Masonic Cipher, Caesar’s Cipher, and Morse Code — were introduced and explained in general terms before participants attempted to solve the cipher independently.
The workshop dossier and materials are available for download [here].