ICT Basics
Primary 4 · Science and Elementary Technology
ICT Basics
Lesson 1 of 5
14 min
Let's begin
Uwase's mother sells avocados at the market. A customer pays with his phone, and a message arrives: "You have received 1,500 Frw." At home, her father listens to the news on the radio, and her brother watches a science lesson on a laptop.
Phones, radios and laptops all do one job: they help us handle information. They are all ICT.
ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology. It means all the tools we use to create, store, send and receive information: words, numbers, pictures, sounds and videos.
In Rwanda, ICT lets people pay with mobile money, apply for documents online and learn with school laptops.
Data is information, such as a temperature, a time, a photo or a song. It can be shown in two ways.
| Analogue | Digital |
|---|---|
| Changes smoothly, with no jumps, like a slope. | Changes in steps, using numbers (digits), like a staircase. |
| A clock with moving hands; a thermometer with a red line that rises; a bathroom scale with a turning needle. | A phone clock showing 07:45; a digital thermometer showing 36.8; a photo on a phone. |
Computers are digital. Inside, they store everything, even photos and music, using only two digits: 0 and 1. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit.
Try this with five cards. Put 1 dot on the first card, 2 on the next, then 4, 8 and 16: each card has double the dots of the one before. Lay them in a row with 16 on the left. A card turned face up means 1, face down means 0. To show the number 5, turn up only the 4 card and the 1 card: 00101. That is how a computer writes 5!
Tip
Analogue slides, digital steps
Analogue moves smoothly like a clock's hands sliding round. Digital jumps in steps, like numbers on a phone. And computers count with just two fingers: 0 and 1.
Try each one first, then tap Show answer to check.
What does ICT stand for?
Answer: Information and Communication Technology.
Name three ICT tools you have seen at home or at school.
Answer: For example: a mobile phone, a radio, a laptop, a television, a camera, a projector.
The school clock has hands that move round. Is it analogue or digital?
Answer: Analogue, because the hands move smoothly.
With the dot cards 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, which cards show the number 3?
Answer: The 2 card and the 1 card (2 + 1 = 3), written 00011.
What you learned today
Sources and credits
The exercises (Try it yourself and the practice questions) are written by Ganzaa.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Quick check
Match each ICT tool to one thing people use it for.
Tap one on the left, then its partner on the right.
