Objectives for this topic

By the end of this topic, you should be able to:

draw, describe and construct truth tables for OR, NOT and XOR gates;
discuss Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality and their relationship with logic gates.

You might also be able to:

describe the interaction between logic gates and computer systems.

Introduction

Sound data is more complicated to deal with than numbers or text because it is not easily converted from its raw state into digital 0s and 1s. Unlike with text, the decisions you make can have a huge impact on the size of the file and the quality of the resulting sound: an uncompressed sound file can easily take 10 megabytes per minute of sound. While this might not seem much for your computer, if the sound is transmitted over the internet in real-time or stored on an IoT device, this is considered a huge amount of storage space.

Working through your coursebook

Read pages 30—33 in your Computing Stage 9 book.

Complete the Practise task on page 30.
Make sure that you understand the keywords described on page 30. Add them to your cram.com flashcards.
Read the Abstraction and Algorithmic Thinking task on page 31.
Complete the Practise tasks on pages 31-33. You can use the same Using Logic Gates worksheet that you used in the last topic.

Read pages 34-37 in your Computing Stage 9 book.

Read the Learn box on page 34 and consider where you sit in the digital divide.
Make sure that you understand the keywords described on pages 34 and 26. Add them to your cram.com flashcards.
Read the Generalisation task on page 35.
Complete the Practise task on page 35. Your tutor will not be able to mark these, but feel free to send them through for your tutor to have a look at if you wish.
Complete the Go Further task on page 26. Consider how the table at the end makes use of decomposition.
Complete the Challenge Yourself task on page 37.

Review

Reflect upon the pages you have just covered. In your notes, summarise:

what you have learnt;
what you already knew;
what surprised you;
what you are curious to know more about.

Support activity for this topic

Watch this video to see some logic gates combined and written up in truth tables:

Extension activity for this topic

Watch this video for a bit of a thought-provoking discussion on the digital divide: