Interacting The Baby (Digital 60)

Interacting with the Baby

Programming the Baby is a slow process. After translating the instructions into binary by hand, they are entered line by line, pushing buttons for each bit that was a one. Luckily modern computers are much easier to use with improvements to the 'human computer interface' (HCI). Keyboards and other peripherals encode actions into binary, for instance pressing a character A sends 01000001 (65). Touch screens and intuitive gestures make products like the iPhone easier to use. In this example, the position the screen was touched is translated into co-ordinates which are processed in binary.

Computers are also easier to program with assemblers, which are programs which run on other computers to translate the basic machine instructions written as words (such as add, subtract, compare etc) into binary machine code. Other programs also exist to make programming easier, some of which work graphically for ease of use. 'Alice' is one example which can be used by school children, and was used in the digital 60 animation competition.


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