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← Investigators TechnologyHow computers store letters25 minutesStd 6–8

Wear Your Name in Binary

✨ Your bracelet spells your initial in the only language a computer actually understands: on and off.

A bracelet of five beads with the binary place values sixteen, eight, four, two and one written above them, showing the pattern one zero zero one zero adding to sixteen plus two equals eighteen, the letter R.
How it works

🧰 You need

  • beads or paper squares in two colours
  • string or thread
  • paper and pencil
  • a friend to swap with

⚠️ Keep small beads away from young children.

👀 What you will see

Every letter from A to Z fits in exactly five beads. Different letters give clearly different bead patterns, and decoding is just adding up place values. Two friends with the same initial produce identical bracelets.

🧪 Do it

  1. Number the alphabet so that A is 1 and Z is 26, and find the number for your initial.
  2. Convert that number to binary by halving repeatedly and writing the remainders in reverse.
  3. Check your answer by adding up the place values 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1.
  4. Thread five beads, dark for one and light for zero, in the order you wrote.
  5. Swap bracelets with a friend and decode their letter without being told it.
  6. Make a second bracelet for a whole short word using five beads per letter.

💡 Why it happens

A computer stores information with switches that are either on or off, written as 1 and 0, and each single 1 or 0 is called a bit. Place values in binary go 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, doubling each time instead of going up in tens, so five bits can make 32 different combinations, which is more than the 26 letters needed. Real computers group eight bits into a byte and use agreed codes such as ASCII and Unicode so that every machine reads the same bits as the same character. Everything else, including photographs and music, is stored as numbers in this same way.

🔁 Now try this

Add a sixth bead chosen so that the number of dark beads is always even, then see whether you can catch a friend who flips one bead on purpose.

🤔 Think about it

How many different letters could you store using only three beads?

🧘 Ask the Acharya

“How many different letters could you store using only three beads?” — ask him and he will explain it from your own chapters.

Ask Guru →

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Ask GuruAcharya Samayeshwar