Preview
IB DP Computer Science — A1 Computer fundamentals — Data representation and computer logic | SL | A1.2.2
📋 What You Will Learn
- Explain the fundamentals of binary encoding and why computers use two states
- Describe how integers and characters/strings are stored as bit patterns (ASCII, Unicode)
- Describe how images are stored as pixels with a resolution and colour depth
- Describe how audio is stored through sampling, and video as frames plus audio
- Explain the impact of binary encoding on storage size and on data retrieval
- Calculate the storage needed for a given image or audio clip
💡 Why This Matters A light switch is unmistakably on or off — never "slightly on". Computers are built from billions of such two-state switches, so everything they store — a mark out of 7, the letter A, one orange pixel, a millisecond of a song — must first be turned into patterns of 0s and 1s. What differs is only the encoding rule used to