My Name in Bits - Expanding Your Horizons

Category: Computing | Career: Digital Signal Processing

My Name in Bits... Discovering Me, Myself, and I!

Purpose:

Students will learn to represent their name in binary bits
Students will learn to decipher binary bits into words
Students will learn how to reduce errors by coding the bits

Number of students in workshop: Not more than 24 (Group size: 3 students, Number of groups: not more than 8)

Supplies:

A projector
Two sets of hats – 12 of each set (I would choose party hats like Cinderella and Tinker Bell)
A table and 3 chairs -- for each group
Per person – A pen and a paper with the following table printed out

Letter	Binary Code	Letter	Binary Code
A	0 0 0 0 1	P	1 0 0 0 0
B	0 0 0 1 0	Q	1 0 0 0 1
C	0 0 0 1 1	R	1 0 0 1 0
D	0 0 1 0 0	S	1 0 0 1 1
E	0 0 1 0 1	T	1 0 1 0 0
F	0 0 1 1 0	U	1 0 1 0 1
G	0 0 1 1 1	V	1 0 1 1 0
H	0 1 0 0 0	W	1 0 1 1 1
I	0 1 0 0 1	X	1 1 0 0 0
J	0 1 0 1 0	Y	1 1 0 0 1
K	0 1 0 1 1	Z	1 1 0 1 0
L	0 1 1 0 0	.	1 1 0 1 1
M	0 1 1 0 1	?	1 1 1 0 0
N	0 1 1 1 0	!	1 1 1 0 1
O	0 1 1 1 1	" "	1 1 1 1 0

Pre-Activity Prep: set up supplies

I. Introduction and Career Definition (5 minutes):

“Hello, my name is _____ and I am a Researcher at Seagate Technology. Before, I tell you about the company and myself, I would like all of you to give a brief introduction about yourself -- your name, what grade you are in, your school, your favorite subject and your hobbies.

Did you hear about Seagate before? Can you guess what our company does?

Seagate designs and manufactures magnetic hard drives.

Do you know what a hard drive is? It is where your computer saves all the data – text, music, pictures, videos etc.

Can you tell me some more devices where hard drives are used?

TiVo which records TV shows
MP3 players like Apple’s iPod, mini iPod
Digital cameras and camcorders
Even the cars.

Let me tell you about myself too…

Specifically, I am here today to show what our team does. The purpose of the workshop is to teach you why information that you save in a hard drive needs to be coded.

II. Collecting and using information (15 minutes):

First, I would like each workgroup to come up with a definition for code.

(Wait for answers.)

Dictionary meaning: set of rules

List four places or areas where a code is used and why?

(Wait for answers)

On books/grocery items, secret messages between spies, credit cards

III. Hands-on activity, take home per person (30 minutes):

Now that you know where coding is used in your everyday life, let us see why it is mainly used in magnetic recording.

Computers can only understand 0 and 1’s. That’s why any information to be stored on a computer/disc drive needs to be simplified into a string of 1’s and 0’s.

Bit: either 1 or 0.

Byte: a sequence of 8 bits

Let’s do a small exercise to try to demonstrate how digitization works. First I want each of you to write your name according to the table. This is called encoding.

(Wait for them to finish)

When we save these bits in a disk and try to read, due to noise in the system a few bits might change.

What is the source of noise? (Wait for answer)

Electronics. (Show the disk drive)

Now in the name code that you have written, change a few bits and then try to decode. Are there any funny words???

How do we detect errors? How to correct errors?

Introduce redundancy and parity for finding single errors. Give an example using parity bits and ask them to find where the error is. And if time permits, correcting bits also (NEWS example in the presentation).

What if there are more than two errors? You will need a stronger code. But, no code is perfect. A little strategy will improve the code’s performance.

Now let us play a small game that will introduce some strategy.

Play the Hat game (Described in the presentation). If the number of students is less than 24, make sure you will have both same hat scenarios represented and for rest of the groups use the patterns of choice from presentation. Also, make sure they do not see their owns hats or talk to each other.

Ask them to guess their hat and what strategy they used. Count how many groups win. If they cannot guess the strategy, explain the strategy and if time permits play the game again.

IV. Closing, show and tell:

Thank you for being a part of this workshop today. Before we conclude, are there any questions? Did you girls have fun?

(Provide contact info.)

Thanks for attending!

Sources Used for examples: