aski
Legacy Member
In the course of getting my 9-year-old interested in technology, she asked me, "how do computers know what we want them to do?"
After a thorough explanation of how we write a computer program as a set of instructions for the computer to execute, we started discussing how machines cannot understand those instructions directly, but only communicate in ones and zeroes. I am admittedly having a hard time wrapping my head around how to present the idea that the number 3 can be represented in binary as 00000011, for example.
Is there a good way to teach this, in the same way as she already knows what a "ones" place, a "tens" place, a "hundreds" place, etc., are in base-10 math?
After a thorough explanation of how we write a computer program as a set of instructions for the computer to execute, we started discussing how machines cannot understand those instructions directly, but only communicate in ones and zeroes. I am admittedly having a hard time wrapping my head around how to present the idea that the number 3 can be represented in binary as 00000011, for example.
Is there a good way to teach this, in the same way as she already knows what a "ones" place, a "tens" place, a "hundreds" place, etc., are in base-10 math?