Expand+IS10060 Digital Technology
Academic Year 2021/2022
How do mobile phones actually work? Why are binary and hexadecimal of fundamental importance to computers? What should I look out for when buying a laptop? How do I read a CPU spec? What is the dif...

Hide-IS10060 Digital Technology
Academic Year 2021/2022
How do mobile phones actually work? Why are binary and hexadecimal of fundamental importance to computers? What should I look out for when buying a laptop? How do I read a CPU spec? What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web? These questions and more will be answered in this module. It aims to provide students with a grounding in the principal technological components of modern information systems. This background will help students to successfully tackle some of the technological aspects of subsequent level 2, 3 and 4 I&CS modules.

Learning Outcomes:
An understanding of:
* How computers work
* Networks, the Internet and the WWW
* Hardware and software
* Artificial Intelligence
Indicative Module Content:
*Data representation
Number systems
Decimal, binary, hexadecimal
How to convert between number systems, particularly between decimal, hex and binary
Uses of binary and hexadecimal in computers
How to name multiple bytes

*Hardware: binary to circuit boards
How binary numbers are stored via transistors
Boolean logic and how it is implemented in logic gates
How logic gates are combined to produce digital circuits
Hardware: circuit boards to PCs
CPUs and CPU specs
Hardware: Motherboard and memory
Buses, bridges and expansion slots
RAMs, ROMS, caches and more
Buying a laptop
How to interpret a laptop spec

*Mobile phones
How they work
How to read mobile phone specs

*Networks
The technology
5G

*The Internet & the WWW
HTML, CSS

*Spreadsheets
Using Google Sheets

*Artificial Intelligence