Language Arts was a physical puzzle consisting of a rock painted white with some multi-colored dots and lines on it:
The lines and dots formed Morse code letters. Ordering them in rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) order (and making sure they're oriented correctly) gives the phrase WASH ME.
Some light scrubbing of the rock reveals that this top layer is painted in washable paint. Once removed, a new set multi-colored lines and symbols appears:
This layer contains information encoded using 4 different ciphers: Pigpen, binary, flag semaphore, and Braille. However, on this layer, each section needs to be decoded first using lines with red as a component color (so red, orange, and violet), then yellow (yellow, orange, and green), and finally blue (blue, green, and violet) to get three letters per segment. For normal mode, this was clued by the phrase in the flavortext to “Remember Your Basics.” Decoding all four sections in this way gives the cluephrase OUTSIDE BONES:
| Cipher | Color | Letter | Decoded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pigpen | Red | O | O |
| Pigpen | Yellow | U | U |
| Pigpen | Blue | T | T |
| Binary | Red | 10011 | S |
| Binary | Yellow | 01001 | I |
| Binary | Blue | 00100 | D |
| Semaphore | Red | E | E |
| Semaphore | Yellow | B | B |
| Semaphore | Blue | O | O |
| Braille | Red | ⠝ | N |
| Braille | Yellow | ⠑ | E |
| Braille | Blue | ⠎ | S |
The phrase OUTSIDE BONES is a clue for the answer to this puzzle, EXOSKELETON.
In order to produce this puzzle, we first painted the rocks white using acrylic paint and used colored acrylic paints to create the bottom layer (pigpen, binary, etc.). We found it was important to use acrylic paints with a relatively light shade so that they would be masked by the top layer of washable paint.
(For BayPHL, we skipped the bottom layer of acrylic white paint, because we found that the acrylic paints had sufficient contrast against the rock surface.)
After painting the bottom layer, we covered it with a layer of spray-on clear coat, as otherwise washing off the top layer would also remove some of the bottom layer as well.
We then applied several layers of (Crayola-brand) washable white paint until the bottom layer was no longer visible, and used washable colored paints to create the top layer (Morse code).