Case-Based Instruction of "How Computer Works" Courses for High School Students

The concept of binary, which is the basis of how computer works, is often taught in Taiwan\´s high school computer courses as the introductory unit of the class "Introduction to Computers". In the past, teachers used to lecture through binary concepts such as the decimal binary conversion, ASCII code transformation, and several traditional courses. However, most students did not know why they needed to learn binary concepts, and seemed less interested in learning. To enhance the effectiveness of learning, we incorporated some examples corresponding to each binary concept to link students\´ life experiences to the concepts in order to make learning meaningful. In this paper, we will share our teaching materials for the binary concept from the course "Introduction to Computers". The lesson starts from how computer stores values, text or image data to introduce basic concepts of binary data interpretation and hex conversion. Afterwards, a combination of simple logic gates adder instance is introduced to guide students to learn how to perform a binary compute operation. Finally, software CPU simulator is covered to allow students to learn and visualize how computer uses binary data and basic operations to perform some specific compute functions.