LAB 2 - Introduction to Computers and Computer Programming

Lab Exercises

Topics Lab Exercises

What Computers Understand?  1.11, 1.12

Why Digitize Media?                            1.13, 1.14

Computer Science for Everyone            1.20, 1.21, 1.22

Exercises

1.11 Find an ASCII table on the Web: A table listing every character and its corresponding numeric representation. Write down the sequence of numbers whose ASCII values make up your name.

1.12 Find a Unicode table on the Web. What's the difference between ASCII and Unicode? How many bytes does each use to represent a character? Write down the sequence of numbers whose Unicode values make up your name.

1.13 Consider the representation for pictures described in Section 1.3, where each “dot" (pixel) in the picture is represented by three bytes, for the red, green, and blue components of the color at that dot. How many bytes does it take to represent a 640x480 picture, a common picture size on the Web? How many bytes does it take to represent a 1024x768 picture, a common screen size? (What do you think is meant now by a “3 megapixel" camera?)

1.14 How many digits are used in the binary number system? How many digits are used in the decimal number system? How would you represent 3, 5, 8, and 13 in the binary number system?

Choose one of the following and write a paragraph answering the questions:

1.20. Look up Alan Kay and the Dynabook on the Web. Who is he, and what does he have to do with media computation?

1.21. Look up Alan Turing on the Web. Who was he, and what does he have to do with our notion of what a computer can do and how encodings work?

1.22. Look up Kurt Gödel on the Web. Who was he, and what amazing things did he do with encodings?

Submit answers to 1.11, 1.12, 1.13 and your paragraph through the DropBox in WebCT.