Binary Code Professional Development

This Professional Development (PD) has been created based on the Year 5/6 Digital Technologies Knowledge and Understanding content descriptor ‘Examine whole numbers are used to represent all data in digital systems (ACTDIK015) from the Australian Curriculum: Technology.

Within this content descriptor there are 6 elaborations, being:

• recognising that digital systems represent all types of data using number codes that ultimately are patterns of 1s and 0s (called binary digits, which is why they are called digital systems)

• explaining that binary represents numbers using 1s and 0s and these represent the on and off electrical states respectively in hardware and robotics

• recognising that the numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3 could be represented by the patterns of two binary digits of 00, 01, 10 and 11

• representing whole numbers in binary, for example counting in binary from zero to 15, or writing a friend’s age in binary

• exploring how division by two can be used as a technique to determine the binary representation of any whole number by collecting remainder terms

• representing the state of an object in a game as active or inactive using the respective binary values of 1 or 0

If you are like me, I read this content descriptor and the elaborations and the first thought that comes to mind is, what on earth is ‘binary code?!’. We cannot effectively teach something we have little to no knowledge about, with this in mind I have decided to create this PD to give a starting point of information on binary code and some activities on how to teach it within the classroom. The activities will also be linked with the year 5/6 Digital technologies processes and production skills content descriptor of ‘acquire, store and validate different types of data and use a range of software to interpret and visualise data to create information (ACTDIP016)’.