Binary in plain English

You need to teach binary as part of the curriculum, but do really understand it? The binary number system is a base-2 number system. This means, it only has two numbers, 0 and 1. You might be thinking, our decimal number system has numbers 0-9 so why don’t we use this? Well, with electronics and computer systems, they only have two electrical states, on or off. These two states can be represented as zero (off) or one (on).

When you touch any character on a computer, it has an assigned number which is represented using a combination of zeros and ones, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program and no matter what the language. This is known as the Unicode (‘an international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts, by which each letter, digit, or symbol is assigned a unique numeric value that applies across different platforms and programs‘).

Reading binary isn’t as hard as you think. Check this out:

How did this come about? Watch the video below:

 

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