Binary Bracelets - Posted by Cathy McLeer

An easy lesson to use with Math, Communications, Science, Patterns….      

I have used this to reinforce multiplication, addition and problem solving. I most often use it in my coding club to teach a bit more about how computers work and communicate. A student in grade five made the observation that, “because they are electric, they can only have open and closed switches, right? So the zeroes and ones are like open and closed?”

For math, they have to solve the problem of: If your bracelet is __cm long,  how many letters can they have if the beads are _mm thick and there are 8 characters in a letter and there must be a spacer between each one?

Consider the age of your students when deciding the size of beads you buy.

Choose the colours that will represent your zero’s and ones as well as a spacer.

Write out the code you want to write.

Use some Elmer’s spray adhesive to hold beads in place.

Place beads in order before stringing them onto the elastic. Start with a spacer and end with a spacer.

In order to anchor your beads so they don’t all fall off, loop your elastic around your start bead by going through the hole twice or if it a dangly one tying a knot around it. I use a couple of reef knots to be sure it doesn’t come  undone. (knot for your shoes, left over right and through, right over left and through)

The ASCII Code

The ASCII code for capital letters is shown below. Unlike base-10 numbers, which can have the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, binary (base-2) numbers can only have the digits 0 and 1 (we usually call the binary digits bits). On this cheat-sheet card, the white squares represent 1 and the black squares represent 0.

Using this card, you can see that the word “CAT” would be spelled 01000011 (C) 01000001 (A) 01010100 (T). ASCII is also able to encode lower-case letters, spaces, and some punctuation, so you can refer students who are interested in those to a complete table

Letter        

I									SPACE