LESSON 1 (COMPUTERS)
Thinking Robots
To truly understand anything we must know how it works at it’s most basic level.
How the smallest pieces fit together to make the whole.
To get robots to follow instructions we use computers. To understand how they work and how to use them we need to ask 2 questions:
How does a machine remember?
&
How does a machine make a decision?
How does a machine remember?
Inside a computer we have billions of tiny electronic switches called transistors.
Each tiny switch (transistor) can only be ON or OFF — that’s called BINARY!
ON means 1
OFF means 0
These switches (transistors) are grouped in teams of 8, called a BYTE.
We store information with these teams of switches (bytes) by creating patterns of ON (1) or OFF (0).
01000001 = A
Lots of bytes together = words, pictures, songs, videos.
No matter what it is — a letter “A”, a red color, a dog barking, or a robot walking — the computer turns it all into numbers (binary patterns) and stores them in memory. When it needs to show or play it back, it turns the numbers back into what we see or hear.
How does a computer make decisions?
The brain of the computer is the CPU (Central Processing Unit). Here, billions of transistors (those tiny switches) are wired together in Logic Gates. They’re the microscopic Lego pieces inside the processor chip.
A logic gate is like a tiny boss made of a few switches. It looks at one or two inputs and decides whether to turn its own output switch ON or OFF.
There are three main gates:
AND gate: “I only turn ON if both my workers are ON.”
(1 AND 1 = 1, everything else = 0)
OR gate: “I turn ON if at least one worker is ON.”
(1 OR 0 = 1, 0 OR 0 = 0)
NOT gate: “I do the opposite of what my worker says.”
(NOT 1 = 0, NOT 0 = 1)
These three gates (and their friends) can build every single decision the computer makes.
The CPU is just millions and millions of these little gate teams wired together in a clever patterns. It’s like:
Some gate teams add numbers (1 + 1 = 10 in binary)
Some gate teams check if something is true (Is the button pressed? Is it dark?)
Some gate teams decide what color to show on the screen
Some gate teams remember tiny pieces of information for a split second (like registers inside the CPU).
If you don’t understand this don’t worry.
It’s like driving a car: you need to know how to steer, accelerate, and brake (binary + memory + code logic), but you don’t need to understand how the engine’s pistons and valves are built (logic gates).
The CPU is like a super-fast chef who follows recipes (called programs).
Memory (RAM)
If the CPU is the chef following recipes, it needs a place to keep all it’s ingredients while cooking, that’s called RAM (Random Access Memory).
When you open a game → the game moves from the hard drive to RAM so the CPU can grab pieces super fast.
Turn off the computer → RAM forgets everything (that’s why you save your work!).
Hard drive / SSD
The CPU (the Chef) needs a place to keep all it’s ingredients for cooking, like a pantry.
All your games, photos, videos, Minecraft worlds live in long-term storage (hard drive or SSD).
It remembers things even when the computer is off.
