98-489 Student Taught Courses (StuCo): Decoding Hidden Messages in Media

3 units, Carnegie Mellon University

This interactive course explores how creators hide secret codes, easter eggs, and ciphers across media such as video games, cartoons, and web series. Students learn to decode text ciphers (Caesar, Atbash, Vigenère), image manipulations, and audio distortions. Assignments include weekly decoding tasks, a midterm in-class exam, and a final project analyzing a coded video. By the end of the course, students will be able to independently recognize and decode hidden messages.

Prerequisites: none listed

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