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Year 8 · Computing · Binary and data · Lesson 3

Text as data

How text is stored as data: character sets, ASCII codes, Unicode, and working out the size of text.

Whiteboard video lesson: Text as data

19-minute video lesson

Teaching, worked examples and 20 practice questions solved step by step.

Watch free for a month

What your child will learn

  • Explain what a character set is
  • Use ASCII codes
  • Convert character codes to binary
  • Compare ASCII and Unicode
  • Calculate the size of text

The method

  1. Start from a known code.
  2. Count on through the alphabet.
  3. Convert between denary and binary.
  4. Size = characters × bits per character.

Key words: character set, ASCII, Unicode, character, code, bit, byte.

Worked examples

The first three practice questions from the lesson, with every step.

Question 1

What is ASCII short for?

  1. Step 1: American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Answer: American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Question 2

If ‘a’ is 97, what is ‘c’?

  1. Step 1: a 97, b 98, c 99

Answer: 99

Question 3

If ‘A’ is 65, what is ‘Z’?

  1. Step 1: Z is the 26th letter: 65 + 25

Answer: 90