This unit explores the technical challenges and questions that arise from the need to represent digital information in computers. Learn how complex information like numbers, text, images, and sound are represented in text, how compression works, and the broader social impacts of digitizing the world's information.
Students will be able to:
Communicate with classmates about computing innovations in their lives.
Describe positive and negative effects of computing innovations.
Students will be able to:
Explain how the same piece of information can be represented in a variety of different ways.
Use a device to represent different pieces of information
Use patterns to represent information
Students will be able to:
Explain the challenges of creating a clear set of rules for ordering patterns
Follow a set of rules for ordering sets of patterns
Students will be able to:
Explain how the position of each binary digit determines its place value and numeric value
Represent binary numbers using combinations of decimal (base 10) digits 0-9
Represent decimal numbers using combinations of binary (base 2) digits 0 and 1
Students will be able to:
Understand that overflow and roundoff errors result from real-world limitations in representing place value.
Students will be able to:
Describe the challenges in representing text when using a fixed number of bits for each character
Develop a system for using numbers to represent text
Explain how bits are grouped to represent abstractions like numbers and text.
Students will be able to:
Explain how bits can be used to represent the individual pixels of a black and white image
Explain how sampling is used to create a digital form of an analog image
Students will be able to:
Explain how bits can be used to represent the individual pixels of a color image
Explain how digital data is used to approximate real-world analog data
Students will be able to:
Create lossless compressions of text files
Analyze patterns in data to determine compression strategies
Students will be able to:
Examine the effects of lossy compression on text & images
Given a piece of media, decide whether to use lossy or lossless compression based on the needs of a situation
Students will be able to:
Explain how copyright and Creative Commons Licenses can be applied to digital works of creativity
Argue if current copyright laws are helping or harming society using evidence from an article
Students will be able to:
Analyze an article about information digitization to determine the information being digitized and the initial goal or purpose.
Weigh social benefits or harms from a specific instance of information digitization
Students will be able to:
Argue whether the digitization of information has broadly speaking improved or damaged society
Examine articles to identify the social benefits and harms caused by information digitization