Login / Register
Learn how data is represented through media; audio, visual and text. Supported by Google.
Join Other Email Learners
Follow the guide on landing page
About This Course
This online course from the Raspberry Pi Foundation explores how computers do interesting things with data. You’ll discover how to represent and manipulate text, images and sound and compression and other algorithms.
Syllabus
- Week 1
Representing numbers, text and colours
- Week 2
Representing and manipulating Images
- Week 3
Representing sound & compressing files
Learning on this course
If you’d like to take part while our educators are leading the course, they’ll be joining the discussions, in the comments, between these dates:
6 Dec 2021 – 24 Dec 2021
On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to…
- Describe how computers represent things in binary
- Explain common text encoding (ASCII and UTF-8)
- Investigate the physics of sound, and how sampling allows computers to represent sounds
- Compare lossy and lossless compression
- Evaluate whether to use a bitmap or a vector image
Who is the course for?
This course is designed at GCSE-Level to A-Level educators and learners. This course has a focus on supporting educators looking for an engaging way of teaching GCSE Computer Science concepts.
We recommend that learners have a basic understanding of Python, for example gained from our Programming 101 course for beginners
An understanding of binary is helpful but not necessary (you may be interested in our How Computers Work course)
Due to its section on the representation of images, this course includes several steps and questions based around visual content.
What software or tools do you need?
To complete optional coding challenges in this course you will need to download a Python IDE (Integrated Developer Environment) such as Mu.
