Online course in Teaching

Representing Data with Images and Sound: Bringing Data to Life

Learn how data is represented through media; audio, visual and text. Supported by Google.

Representing Data with Images and Sound: Bringing Data to Life

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Overview
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Overview
Topics
Start dates
Requirements
Educators
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  • Duration 3 weeks
  • Weekly study 2 hours
  • Learn Free
  • Extra benefits From $44 Find out more

Learn how data is represented through media; audio, visual and text.

This online course from the Raspberry Pi Foundation explores how computers do interesting things with data. You’ll discover how to represent and manipulate text, images and sound and compression and other algorithms.

What topics will you cover?

  • Units of information
  • Character encoding
  • Representing images
  • Representing sound
  • Data compression

When would you like to start?

Most FutureLearn courses run multiple times. Every run of a course has a set start date but you can join it and work through it after it starts. Find out more

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you'll be able to...

  • Describe how computers represent things in binary
  • Explain common text encoding (ASCII and UTF-8)
  • Produce your own emoji in bitmap and vector form
  • Investigate the physics of sound, and how sampling allows computers to represent sounds
  • Compare lossy and lossless compression

Who is the course for?

This course is designed at GCSE-Level to A-Level educators and learners. This course has a focus on supporting educators looking for an engaging way of teaching GCSE Computer Science concepts.

We recommend that learners have a basic understanding of Python, for example gained from our Programming 101 course for beginners

An understanding of binary is helpful but not necessary (you may be interested in our How Computers Work course)

Due to its section on the representation of images, this course includes several steps and questions based around visual content.

What software or tools do you need?

To take part in this course you will need to download a Python IDE (Integrated Developer Environment) such as Mu.

Who will you learn with?

Mac Bowley

Mac Bowley

Hey, my name is Mac. I am a Learning Manager at The Raspberry Pi Foundation. I love teaching and digital making, especially when I get to do them both at the same time.

Caitlyn Merry

Caitlyn Merry

Caitlyn creates and develops Raspberry Pi resources. She is a former teacher, and a postgrad student in social innovation. She likes open tech, the outdoors, art, music, games and anything scifi.

Who developed the course?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation works to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world, so they are capable of understanding and shaping our increasingly digital world.

National Centre for Computing Education courses

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