Week 10: Bits, Binary, Hex, and Encoding

This week begins the Garden State Cyber data-representation block.

Before students can reason about ciphers, steganography, packet fields, or encoded artifacts, they need to understand how computers represent values using bits and bytes.

This week

Lesson 1: Bits, Bytes, and Binary: How Computers Represent Data

Use binary place value, convert between decimal and binary, analyze changed bits, and connect representation to later security work.

Lesson 2: Hexadecimal: Read Bytes Without Drowning in Bits

Convert among binary, decimal, and hexadecimal. Learn why one byte maps cleanly to two hex digits and why hex appears in file and network analysis.

Lesson 3: Encoding Is Not Encryption

Decode teacher-provided binary, hex, ASCII/UTF-8, and Base64 samples. Use a transformation ledger and safe CTF-style challenges while keeping encoding, encryption, and hashing conceptually separate.

What you will produce

• binary conversion tables
• hexadecimal conversion tables
• representation ladder
• byte-sequence analysis
• transformation ledger
• safe decoding CTF evidence

The key idea is:

A value can have several representations without changing what the underlying data means.