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Intro to CS 9-10 / Week 09 / Friday
5/6
Week 09 · Bits and Binary

Friday

Impact Friday: Who gets connected?
// Place values, one byte, overflow, and sampling a smooth curve
⏱ about 20 min

Friday: Impact Friday: Who Gets Connected?

Beacon now sends a daily greenhouse report to three partner classrooms back home.

Two classrooms send cheerful replies with drawings of their own seedlings. The third is silent.

Wren finds a short note from its teacher. "Our town has a slow connection, and thirty students share two computers. The photos never finish loading."

Comet frowns. "So the report works, just not for everyone."

Nova shrinks the report on her display until it shows only a few lines of text. "Fewer bits," she says. "Would that reach them?"

"Let's ask them," Wren says, "instead of guessing."

The digital divide

The digital divide is differing access to computing devices and the Internet. It can depend on income, location, or the group a person belongs to.

The digital divide raises issues of equity, access and influence, both around the world and close to home.

It is affected by the actions of individuals, organizations and governments.

Computing changes how people learn, work and connect. When some people cannot get online, those changes can leave them out.

SPOT THE DIVIDE
  • Read the question.
  • Tap your answer.
A classroom shares two computers among thirty students. Is that part of the digital divide?
Which change to Beacon's report helps the third classroom most?
Who can act to narrow the digital divide?
Try it
Think about your own school or library. Where can people use a computer or get online if they have none at home?
Talk with a grown-up about one thing a community could do to share access more fairly.

Week review

Week reviewTrue or false?
A byte is 8 bits.?
01001011 is 75 in decimal.?
Adding 1 to 255 in one byte causes an overflow error.?
The same bits always mean the same thing.?
Sampling stores a smooth curve exactly, with no approximation.?
WHY THIS EXERCISEBits, place values, limits and context are how every value in Beacon is stored.
OUR WEEK, IN ORDER
  • ?We learned bits, bytes and place values.
  • ?We converted readings between binary and decimal.
  • ?We asked who gets connected at all.
  • ?We found the overflow and sampled a curve.
  • ?We saw one byte mean different things.
WHY THIS EXERCISEThe week moved from single bits to what bits mean for people.
Measuring a smooth signal at regular intervals is called ____.
Differing access to devices and the Internet is called the digital ____.
What error happens when a number is too big for its fixed number of bits? Type one word.
WHY THIS EXERCISEOverflow is one of the four kinds of errors from last week, and now you know why it happens.
On paper, sketch a lighter version of Beacon's daily report that could reach the third classroom. Label what you removed and what you kept.

Excellent week, developer. Tomorrow's Mission Quest is a bit-card game for the family.

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