Ones and Zeroes, Ones and Zeroes, Ones and Zeroes

Week 8, Day 2

The title of this post is sung to the tune of Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow." 

Professor Moss started class by writing these four numbers on the board:

1

10

11

100

?

He told us he heard something about these numbers on the radio this morning.  When he asked us what number comes next, my classmates bombarded him with different answers.  "101!"  "110!"  "111!"  "1000!"  We couldn't seem to agree on what the correct answer was , so Professor Moss separated the class, with the girls on one side of the room and the boys on the other.  Both groups were asked to come up with the correct answer, along with rationale, justification, and logic that explained the answer.  We were given about 15-20 minutes to discuss among ourselves, while Professor Moss left the room.  The girls came up with two possible answers:  101 and 111.  The majority of the girls thought that the answer was 111, based on the following pattern:

1

10+

_____

11

100+

_____

111

1000+

_____

1111

10000

_____

and so on

I personally thought that the answer was 101, based on what I learned about the binary system in my Art 322 class a few weeks ago.  And even if the binary system isn't used to solve this problem, the next number should still be 101, following the ascending sequence of numbers that contain only ones and/or zeroes.  Getzabel also thought that the next number was 101 too, but we took a vote and all the other girls decided that the number should be 111, so the majority won.

When Professor Moss came back, the girls were asked to explain their answer(s) first.  Astrid came up to the board to explain how we came up with 111.  After two tries, she was able to convince Professor Moss why 111 was the answer, by explaining the girls' logic and the pattern that we discovered.  When it was the boys' turn, things did not go as smoothly.  The boys came up with the answer of 101, based on the binary system.

00

01

10

11

100

101

110

111

1000

and so on

It took three boys to convince Professor Moss that 101 was the correct answer.  Professor Moss then told us that 101 and 111 were both good answers, and that this was an exercise in communication.  The lesson of this activity was that it didn't matter what answer we came up with, just as long as we were able to effectively communicate our logic, rationale, and justification to the audience.  This is very important in the design world, because we need to be able to effectively "sell" a solution to a client by explaining the rationale and justification behind it.

The rest of the class period was spent discussing what we thought about John Coy and his lecture.  Opinions about Mr. Coy were mixed - about half of the class liked his lecture, and the other half found it boring.  No offense to Mr. Coy, but I found his presentation just a tad boring.  The only thing that I remember from his lecture was the Washington Mutual logo, so I brought that up during the discussion.

By the way, our homework for Monday was to dream about the final project.  Before going to sleep, we were to think about all of the elements for our final project and try to dream about it.  I tried doing just that, but I didn't dream about the final project...I ended up having two nightmares instead!  I think that movie we watched on Monday got me really paranoid :(