← Back to course
AI Explorers 6-8 / Week 03 / Explorer Quest
6/6
Week 03 · Encoding the World

Explorer Quest

Explorer Quest: Secret picture swap
// Pixels, color values and feature tables
⏱ about 20 min

Explorer Quest: Secret Picture Swap

The station screens are fixed now, but the crew has grown quite fond of sending pictures as codes.

Rocket passes Raven a folded note covered in digits. "Decode this," he says. "No peeking at my drawing."

Raven shades square after square. Slowly, a lopsided rocket ship appears on her graph paper.

"It looks like you," she says, laughing.

Nova hovers above the two grids and compares them. "Almost identical," she says. "Your encoding worked."

Rocket is already drawing the next one.

  1. A digital picture is made of many small spots of color called pixels.
  2. A computer stores a red, green and blue value for each pixel, each from 0 to 255.
  3. All three at 255 make white. Lower values make a pixel darker, down to black at 0.
  4. An encoding turns information into numbers. Every encoding keeps some details and drops others.
  5. Sky Sorter describes each snapshot with a feature row: brightness, size and streak.
◇ SECRET PICTURE SWAP
Each player draws a secret picture on a 6 by 6 grid, using only full squares.
Encode it: write 1 for a shaded square and 0 for a blank one, row by row.
Swap only the codes. Each player shades a blank grid from the codes.
Compare the rebuilt picture with the original. Did anything get lost or flipped?
Round two: use a 0 to 3 code for light, medium and dark shading. Is it easier or harder?
For a grown-up
Ask: what is an encoding, and what did your encoding keep or lose?
Ask: photos are stored as numbers. Why does that make them easy to copy and share, and why should we be careful?
This course never connects your student to a real AI tool, chatbot or app.
QUEST CHECK
  • Read the question.
  • Tap your answer.
In the 0 and 1 code, what does a 1 mean?
A 6 by 6 grid has how many squares to encode?
Which code keeps more shading detail?
What is a small spot of color in a digital picture called? Type one word.
WHY THIS EXERCISEPixels are the building blocks of every snapshot Sky Sorter will ever sort.
← Friday