Friday, June 24, 2016

Binary to base 10

This Scratch program would be extremely easy to teach to middle school students....except....for some reason, the developers of Scratch never included a general exponent operator block.  A simple x^y would have sufficed.  Instead, they only offer 10^x and e^x .

Scratchers have complained about this for years, but nothing has changed. 

So, a simple "turn a binary number into a base-10 number" program, which any 6th grader could write and understand, gets kind of complicated because the programmer needs to convert base 10 to base 2, which is easy for Algebra 2 students who knows logs, but not for 6th graders who barely have their heads wrapped around exponents.

Oh well. This will be a good opportunity to let the kids do some Python programming.  The scratch version is shared.


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