CS02-04 Computer Science Coming soon
Unicode
CS02-04
This lesson is coming soon.
In this lesson
Describe the purpose of Unicode and its advantages over ASCII, state the cost of those advantages, and state that Unicode uses the same codes as ASCII up to 127.
What it covers
- The PURPOSE of Unicode: one code for every character in every language, plus symbols and emoji
- The advantages over ASCII, in the specification's own terms - representing different alphabets and special symbols, allowing a far greater range of characters
- THE COST, which OCR examines: more bits per character means more memory or storage for the same text
- That Unicode uses the SAME codes as ASCII up to 127, so ASCII is a subset of it
- The consequence: for a character like A the ASCII answer and the Unicode answer are the same number, so read which one the question asked for
- That Unicode is a bigger set, not a different arrangement - the ordering ideas from CS02-03 still hold
Key words
For: AQA GCSE 8525, OCR GCSE J277
On the specification
| Board | Spec | Statement |
|---|---|---|
| AQA GCSE 8525 | 3.3.5 | Character encoding |
| OCR GCSE J277 | 1.2.4 | Data storage - Numbers |
For teachers
This GCSE Computer Science lesson teaches Unicode. By the end, students should be able to describe the purpose of Unicode and its advantages over ASCII, state the cost of those advantages, and state that Unicode uses the same codes as ASCII up to 127. It works through three worked examples and the mistakes examiners report.