Yeah when I’m teaching new networking guys how binary and hex works I always reference the changeover from 9- the next place (tens, hundreds, thousands) to conceptualize the idea that we count the way we do only because of base ten.
In order to teach alternate forms of counting you have to first break someone out of the idea that base ten is “how it’s done” which is difficult because we never mention in education prior to college or trade schools that you can count with literally any number of symbols if you wanted to.
Yep, I think the problem with most folks is that base 10 is taken for granted without fully understanding it. Maybe some of the concepts would be even easier to explain in hex instead of in binary - that you count to F instead of to 9 before flipping to 10, then explaining that binary follows the same principle, but only has two digits, hence has to flip to 10 sooner.
Honestly explaining base 15 first is probably the way to go, once you add symbols you can be like “ok now binary works the same way we just have to limit ourselves to two characters.”
I guess the way I’d explain it is take base 10 and replace all the digits with letters, then show how other bases are the same, you just have a different number of possible digits (however you choose to represent them - letters or actual 0-9 digits).
Yeah when I’m teaching new networking guys how binary and hex works I always reference the changeover from 9- the next place (tens, hundreds, thousands) to conceptualize the idea that we count the way we do only because of base ten.
In order to teach alternate forms of counting you have to first break someone out of the idea that base ten is “how it’s done” which is difficult because we never mention in education prior to college or trade schools that you can count with literally any number of symbols if you wanted to.
Yep, I think the problem with most folks is that base 10 is taken for granted without fully understanding it. Maybe some of the concepts would be even easier to explain in hex instead of in binary - that you count to F instead of to 9 before flipping to 10, then explaining that binary follows the same principle, but only has two digits, hence has to flip to 10 sooner.
Honestly explaining base 15 first is probably the way to go, once you add symbols you can be like “ok now binary works the same way we just have to limit ourselves to two characters.”
I guess the way I’d explain it is take base 10 and replace all the digits with letters, then show how other bases are the same, you just have a different number of possible digits (however you choose to represent them - letters or actual 0-9 digits).