Download Homework-booklet-yea.. - Haslingden High School

Haslingden High School
ICT Department
Year 8 Computing
Student name:
Form:
ICT teacher:
Date issued:
Level
Date due:
Effort
Teacher feedback:
KS3 Target level
Parent/Carer comment (optional):
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House
points
About this homework:
On average the tasks should take about 30 minutes each. Do not leave it till the last night
to do them all!
You will need Internet access. If you are not online at home,
please make use of access to the school ICT facilities at
homework club, or go to your local library.
Assessment criteria: ICT and Computing
Assessment focus:
Planning, developing,
evaluating (AF1)
Assessment focus:
finding, using and
communicating
information (AF3)
Level
3
Describe how some ICT
is used at school and
outside of school
Identify ways to keep safe
when using ICT
Level
4
Evaluate the quality of
websites. Explain the
use of some ICT outside
of school
Use ICT to communicate
and collaborate,
identifying some of the
risks and acting to
minimise them
Understand how instructions
are stored and executed
within a computer system
Use ICT safely and
responsibly
Use search technologies
effectively, appreciate how
results are selected and
ranked, and be discerning in
evaluating digital content
Level
5
Identify benefits and
limitations of the use of
ICT and the Internet
both inside and outside
school
Level
6
Explore the impact of
the use of ICT and the
Internet on work,
leisure and home
Level
7
Identify the impact of
ICT and the Internet on
people, communities
and cultures
.
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Statements from the new
Computing Programme of
Study recently released by
the DfE
Evaluate computational
abstractions that model the
state and behaviour of realworld problems and physical
systems
SECTION A
A Brief History of the Computer
What is a computer?
Have you ever wondered what the word “computer” means? If you look it up in a dictionary,
you will find something like:
“an electronic device which runs a program to process data at great speed”
We will come to the words program and data soon; however, the word “computer” means
“something that computes”.
So what does “compute” mean? Well, it means to calculate or work out.
The very first computers were actually people.
They did sums – all day, every day!
From around the 1700s until the 1950s, teams of
these “computers” used to carry out complex
calculations (and check each other’s work).
The Computer Room at NASA (opposite)
This photograph shows human computers
working at NASA as late as 1949.
Task 1
What would be the problem in doing calculations this way?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
What was happening during the 1700s and 1800s that created the need to do lots of
accurate calculations?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
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Made in Britain
Around 1940, the first electronic
computers began to appear.
There is debate about what was the very
first, but Britain led developments with
Colossus. This early computer was built
and used by British Intelligence to break
secret German codes during World War
II.
Colossus was huge (it took up an entire room) and had a tiny fraction of the power of a
modern computer or even a smartphone. Nevertheless, the work done using Colossus and
other machines like it is said to have shortened World War II by at least two years – saving
millions of lives.
Task 2 - Investigate:
Choose one of the following people or developments in
Computing and write a short paragraph below:
Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Altair, Antikythera Mechanism, Apple II, Apple
Macintosh, Charles Babbage, Colossus, IBM, Internet, iPhone, iPad,
Jacquard Loom, LEO, Napier’s “Bones”, Microsoft, silicon chip, World Wide
Web
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SECTION B
Can a computer be intelligent?
The Turing Test
Alan Turing has been described as “The Father of Computing Science”.
In 1950, Alan Turing posed a question that has occupied the minds of leading
experts in many fields since. He asked: “Can machines think?”
To help answer the question, he proposed a test which would, he said,
determine if a computer could think. This has become known as The Turing Test.
In the Turing Test, a person asks questions via a
keyboard to:


a computer (A) and
a human (B).
If the person asking the questions cannot tell the
human and the computer apart from the answers
given, Turing claimed that the computer has passed
the test and could be said to be intelligent.
The wider field of machine intelligence has become
known as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Task 3 - Try having a chat with the following
chat programs online then answer the
questions:
 http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/
 http://cleverbot.com/
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What was it like talking to Eliza?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
What was it like talking to Cleverbot?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
How were Eliza and Cleverbot similar?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
How were Eliza and Cleverbot different?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
When did it seem like you were talking to a human?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
When did it seem like you were not talking to a human?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Which chatbot did you like talking to more? ___________________________________
Why? __________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
If you could not tell whether you were talking to a human or a machine, does it mean that
the machine is intelligent?
Yes/No ___________
Explain your answer ___________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
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Task 4 - Give examples of some machines that you
think show some kind of “intelligence”. Below each
one, describe a way in which you think it is intelligent.
Machine: Satellite navigation unit (e.g. in-car satnav)
What makes it intelligent: Can work out the fastest route for a journey
(which is not always the shortest). Can even allow for how busy routes will be
at certain times of the day.
Machine: __________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
What makes it intelligent: ____________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
Machine: __________________________________________________
What makes it intelligent: ____________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
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Section C
Representing Information
A computer is a machine that processes information (data) using instructions given to it by a human. Computers
are electronic machines, so the instructions and information they work with is represented electronically – by
switches.
Switched on
No matter what kind of computer you are using – a desktop PC, smartphone, games console or embedded computer
– it is doing one thing: processing information (data). Since a computer is made up of switches, then the information
it processes is represented by the positions of switches.
How is this possible? Well, think about an ordinary switch. It has two positions – OFF and ON – but we could also call
these positions (or make them stand for):



YES or NO
BLACK or WHITE
0 or 1
If we had two switches, there would be four possible combinations of these.
Look at the table below that shows the four combinations of two switches and examples of the way that you could
represent different kinds of information by these.
Switch
positions
OFF / OFF
OFF / ON
ON / OFF
ON / ON
0
1
2
3
Colours
Black
Blue
Red
White
Letters
A
B
C
D
Numbers
Now consider if there were millions of switches – you can see how there could be almost endless combinations of
OFF and ON for all of these switches.
A modern computer does contain millions (even billions) of tiny switches and they are used to represent all such
information.
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Binary: The language of computers
No matter what you are using your computer for – watching a movie, listening to music or surfing the web – the data
(information) that the computer is processing is represented by the positions of millions of switches. Computing
scientists like to call the positions 0 and 1 instead of OFF and ON.
This is known as binary. It may seem strange, but it is easier than you might think.
For example, when a computer is working with text, each letter is given a binary code. A table of text characters and
their binary codes is shown below.
Letter
Binary
code
Letter
Binary
code
A
100 0001
N
100 1110
B
100 0010
O
100 1111
C
100 0011
P
101 0000
D
100 0100
Q
101 0001
E
100 0101
R
101 0010
F
100 0110
S
101 0011
G
100 0111
T
101 0100
H
100 1000
U
101 0101
I
100 1001
V
101 0110
J
100 1010
W
101 0111
K
100 1011
X
101 1000
L
100 1100
Y
101 1001
M
100 1101
Z
101 1010
<space>
010 0000
Task 5 – Decode a binary sequence
Decode the message below to reveal the name of a famous person.
Binary
Code
101 0010
100 1111
100 0010
100 0101
101 0010
100 0010
101 0101
101 0010
100 1110
101 0011
Letter
Binary
code
Letter
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101 0100
Task 6 – Encode your name in binary
Using the table shown previously, write your first name in binary!
Write each letter of your first name going down rather than across. Then look up the binary code for each letter in
the table overleaf and write it on the lines across from the letter.
You will have written your name in the computer’s own language!
S →
1 0 1
0 0 1 1
Example: If your
name starts with
“S”
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
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