What are Computers ¿ ¦ Let's learn the basics of Computers .

Hi there and welcome to our first video in our computer literacy course where we are looking at getting to know the basics. So, I'm going to be going through the theory component of this. In other words, just looking at a couple of things we need to cover and then I'm going to show you practically, you know, everything that we are talking about. So, first things first, when it comes to computer literacy, we need to ask the question, well, what is a computer? And you can see from the examples there, we have a laptop, we have a tablet, and we have a smartphone. Okay, so these are the basic examples that we are going to be using throughout this course. Now, many of us are familiar with these. The only one that's missing is the desktop computer. Okay, so there we have a laptop, smartphone, and tablet. Here on the other end, we have what's known as the desktop computer. Now, again, I'm going to be taking you practically through these, but just have a look at the difference. You'll see with your laptop, your keyboard there, your screen over there, and you've got a mouse pad here are all built into one device. Your tablet has a keyboard, a touchscreen, you know, everything built into one device. Your smartphone, you can type on the screen, you can message on the screen, you can, you know, scroll through Facebook on the screen, all of those things, but everything you need to do is built into one device. When we look at the desktop computer, you can see the monitor over here is a separate piece of hardware, right? The keyboard is something separate, the mouse is separate, and what we call the system unit, or, you know, this box here that's got all the major components for the computer is a separate, you know, physical piece of hardware as well. So, those are just the immediate differences between the two, and this is known as our desktop computer. So, please, already now, you start to see the difference between a desktop computer and then what people use, you know, in terms of laptops, smartphones, and tablets. These are all what we call multipurpose devices, okay? Why do we call it multipurpose? Because it can do more than one thing. So, if you think about the ATM machine that you go to, what do you do there? You go there to withdraw money, right? It performs one particular task. Your washing machine at home, it performs one task. If it does anything more than that, if a washing machine allows you to wash and dry, then it would fall under being a multipurpose device. Now, think about all of these things, especially on your smartphone. Can you watch videos? Yes, you can. Can you listen to music? Can you message? Can you take a photo? Can you, you know, shoot video? Yes, you can. You can do it on all of these things. So, this is why they are multipurpose devices. They're also electronic devices, okay? We know that by now, and some are portable and some are not. So, those that fall under the portable or mobile category, that's these devices. Your smartphone can go anywhere with you. Your tablet can go anywhere with you. Even your laptop, you can pop it in a bag, you know, and take it anywhere. And that's what makes these devices portable. Big reason as well, because they all work off batteries. So, a laptop has to be charged, smartphone, tablet, all of those. The desktop computer is not designed to be portable. It's designed to plug into the wall, you know, to get power from a normal wall socket. So, it's not part of that portable family. Okay, then you always have two terms that will come up when it comes to computer literacy, and that's hardware and software. So, when we look at the picture of our desktop computer here, this falls under hardware. But what is hardware? Hardware is the physical parts of a computer. So, your system unit, your keyboard, your mouse, your monitor, that we can touch and see. So, anything that I can physically touch and see, that will fall under hardware. They give us examples of the mouse, the monitor, the keyboard, you know, the parts. Even inside of this box, they are all physical parts that we can touch and see, and therefore, it falls under hardware. Software, on the other hand, these are the specific instructions we give to the computer to get something, you know... Software, on the other hand, are the specific instructions we give the computer to get it to do something useful. Okay, so there we have different types of software, and we're going to be going in detail on this. Windows 10 is an example of what we call an operating system. Again, we'll go into that in a later session. These are examples of different programs. Microsoft Word, for example, allows you to create documents. Excel allows you to create what we call spreadsheets, and then Adobe also allows us to create documents that you can't edit. Okay, so it's good, especially, you know, when you're sending invoicing and things like that. They are multi-purpose tools because they have the ability to run different types of programs. So, some software falls under the category of being multi-purpose tools, because they allow you to run different types of programs on there. So, think about your smartphone. Your smartphone has an operating system. Now, I'm sure many of you would have heard by now, when you buy a smartphone, they'll tell you it is an Android device. So, what that means is, it's the Android software that is running on that smartphone that allows you to do a number of things. It allows you to run WhatsApp on it. It allows you to run Facebook on it. WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, you know, all those things, even the games on your phone, those are all examples of software, right? They are programs that are running within your Android or your Windows, whatever, you know, phone you have. Now, why would a smartphone be regarded as a computer? Because, when we think of a computer, we think of a laptop, desktop, we think of a tablet, you know. But, why would a smartphone be regarded as a computer? Well, apps enable it to do much more than just make phone calls. Now, some of you might remember the very old phones, like the Nokia 6210, you know, 3310, 5110. They could literally only make a call, send a message, and you play Snake on it, okay? That was the extent of it. Now, we can see what the phones can do. Our phones can shoot video. Our phones can take photos. Our phones can record, you know, voice. It can record music. It can do all of these things. So, it falls under being a multi-purpose device. And, because it allows us to do so much more, and it can run other programs on it, it's now regarded as a computer. Now, this is important, because when we ask the question, well, how do computers work? And, we look at the theory around this. Just understand this. We have what's known as the information processing cycle, and this basically tells us we use input, right? Input is when we give instructions to the computer or to the device. So, think of your smartphone. When you switch it on, when you type in a message, what are you doing? You are giving an instruction on the screen for that device to do something. You are putting something in to that device. When you type on the keyboard, you are putting something in to the PC, okay? Then, we have the processing of data. This simply means this is when you are typing, and you now decide you want to throw in an emoji, or you're busy typing out a document, and, you know, you edit the document a bit, you know, to make it look smarter, more professional, things like that. This is also where the hardware of the device. So, all those things in that box, right, all those things work in there to allow you to, you know, continue to do this input process. That all takes place there. Then, from there, once you're done, you know, typing your message, you know, taking a video, typing a document, anything like that, you're then going to decide to do one of two things. Number one, you can save it. That's what storage is here for. Storage just means that we are saving it onto our device, onto the computer. You've now, for example, taken a video of something. You've done a bit of editing over here, and then you just leave it on your phone, right, or you're going to share it with someone. That's fine. Output means, what are you now going to do with it? Well, number one, you're going to look at it. So, that's part of your output. In other words, anything that's coming out to you. So, if you typed out a document, you know, made it look all beautiful, and you are looking at it, that's output. If you print it out, that's output. If you view it on your computer screen, that's all output. So, this is just basically how things work in a computer. With input, we are giving instructions to the computer. We give those instructions through typing on the screen, typing on the keyboard, using the mouse. Those are all things going into the computer. The computer then processes all those instructions in this section over here, through the hardware that it has, and everything else. Then we can decide to save it on the device. We can decide to print something out, or send it to someone else, or just look at it. That's all part of output. So, here we have a typical example of adding a contact to your smartphone. How do we add a contact? Look at this now. When we input, we type in the context details using the keyboard. Remember what did we say? We are giving instructions to the computer. Then, with the process, the smartphone checks if it already has that contact. It's using its physical hardware inside, and its software to check, listen, do I already have that person there? If it's not, it can be stored. Now, the person's details are saved on your phone. That's our storage. Then, when we want to maybe send the person a message, or we find that the contact is already on our phone, output is the message that is now given to us to say, listen, this contact already exists, so you don't have to add it. So, again, remember, input things going into the computer. Processing is where it does all its checks. Storage is where we save it, and output is, if there's anything wrong, if there's any message that comes back to us, or anything coming out to us, that would be part of output. Okay, so computers at its absolute basic, computers take what we call data, or in other words, raw facts, and they turn them into information. Okay, so me having a cell phone number of someone doesn't really mean anything, but when I take that, and I put a name to it, and I put an email address to it, and I save it as a contact, is it now useful information? Yes, it is. Okay, so this is just at its core what computers allow us to do, and this can be from your laptop, your cell phone, your smartphone, desktop computer, anything like that. Enough of this talk. Let's take a tour around some practical examples of hardware and computers. Okay, so in front of me, I've got a number of different pieces that make up the computer. Now, some of you will know this, right? This is a laptop. Okay, so I'm going to open it up there, and you can see with our laptop, we've got our screen, we've got our keyboard, this is the section that we use as a mouse. Okay, but I'm going to go into some details, don't stress about that. That's our laptop, but when you think just of a traditional computer, most of what you look at or think of is this box behind me. So, this is what's known as a and why is it called a desktop computer? Because ideally, it sits on the desk. Okay, please, I didn't come up with the names. This is exactly what it is, but this is what we call a system unit, and the reason for that is all the components that are needed to actually run the computer, the hardware, in other words, physical devices, physical components are in this case. So, when you see towers like this, please remember, first and foremost, this is a desktop computer. Now, it doesn't mean that it has to sit on top of the desk, it can sit underneath, but this is what it is. You can also see at the back, these are just some of the ports, some of the places where things can plug in. So, this section over here is actually for the power that comes from your wall. So, you plug that power cable in and it goes in over here. The reason this one has two outlets over here is because power is going in, and the other one is where power usually goes out maybe to a monitor like the one you see over here. Then we've got a number of other ports. I'm going to go through this in our theory module, but basically, any components outside of this case, things like a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, a printer, any of those things would then plug in over here. So, on the front of our tower, and I'm just going to use this, please, I'm going to use the term tower or system unit, okay, just so that you understand. You can see over there that we've got a big power button, we've got two other slots that we can plug things in with, and we've got two small round ports as well. Not going to explain that yet, we're going to get there. But for now, first things first, just know this is your system unit. This is where you're going to switch the computer on. Generally, you'd have another smaller button that will restart the PC. So, let's say something's gone wrong, everything's frozen, you can press on that and it will force the computer to restart. So, again, when you think of the computer, right, we're talking about everything that's inside this box, our system unit, that's why we call it a system unit, but it also needs a few other things. So, here you can see we've got our screen, okay, or what we actually call our monitor. Now, the reason we call it a monitor is because this is something extra to our box, okay. So, we've got our system unit over here, and when we talk about a monitor, we're talking about an external or something outside of the system unit. When we talk about a screen, generally we refer to something that's built in. So, when you think of your cell phone, we don't talk about a cell phone monitor, we talk about a cell phone screen. Why? Because that screen's actually built into the physical device. So, if I look at my laptop over here, you can see I've got a keyboard. This is where I'm going to type everything out. I've got what looks like a mouse pad over here, and then I've got my screen. Now, can I call this a monitor? No, I'm going to call this a screen. Why? Because it's built in, and you can see with laptops, you have a screen, you've got a keyboard, you've got a mouse, all of that built into one device, and it's designed in such a way that, you know, you can close it, it goes into a sleep mode, and you are able to use it wherever you need to. Now, a big difference between your system unit, your traditional desktop computer, and your laptop is the fact that your laptops are portable, which means they work on a battery, right? They work with a battery. Here at the back, there's actually a battery inside here, and this is why you charge your laptop. You don't charge this device, right? These system units, or your traditional desktop computers, they plug straight into power, and that is why, if you switch the power off, these babies are going to go off, whereas your laptop will still work on its battery for a specified period of time. Depends what you are actually doing on it. So, with that, now that we know this is the system unit, this has got all the components in it that we need to actually have the computer functioning, and we've got our monitor over here. We've also got our keyboard and mouse. Now, I want to take you a little bit closer to the mouse. Okay, so, when we look at our traditional mouse, you can see over here, this one has a cable, right? It's also got two buttons over here, and a little wheel, what looks like a little wheel in the middle, okay? You'll also see underneath, we've got what looks like a little light panel over there. So, this particular mouse, or a mouse, allows us to select items on the screen. So, when we've actually, you know, switched on the PC, we've gone into the PC, this allows us to click, and you can see we've got a click on the left side, and one on the right side. Now, when we click on the left side of the mouse, that is to select objects. So, if I want to open a folder, if I want to click on the Windows button, or, you know, anything like that, select anything, I'm going to use my left click. However, if I want to see the options on a particular item, I click on the right-hand side. So, please remember, left is to select, right is to display the options for that. Now, my little scroll button over here, you can see that. My little scroll button there is exactly what it's saying. When I go to websites, where I'm looking at a document or things, and I want to scroll up and down. On our smartphones, what do we generally do? We just swipe up and down. With this mouse, I can just move on the scroll bar over here. With the mouse, I can just move the scroll button up and down, and it'll do exactly the same for me. As we go into some more detail on these devices, you can see this one connects to the computer via a cable. Here's our traditional keyboard. You can see it is connecting via a cable. The whole idea is this is what is known as a full keyboard. So, we have our letters. We have our row of numbers up here. We have different function options. That's why they're named with an F, right? Function 1, function 2. We've got different buttons over here, and then a number pad that allows us, you know, just to quickly and easily type numbers. So, this is your full keyboard, and this is sort of the size of a traditional keyboard. So, remember those ports that I spoke about at the back of the computer? Well, the keyboard and the mouse would plug into those ports. Now, this one has two in front, which means it doesn't just have to plug in at the back. If there's something wrong with those, it can plug in to the front as well. Now, if we look at our laptop over here, you'll see, again, the screen is built in. The keyboard is built into this design, and this over here, this section over here, is our built-in mouse. Now, how do we know that? Well, we've got a pad here that allows me to move my finger, and it will move the mouse on the screen. I've got a left click and a right click, just like a traditional mouse. Okay, so, that's one of the, again, one of the big differences between a laptop and a traditional desktop computer. With a desktop computer, you've got all these extra bits and pieces on the outside that are connecting to the system unit. Remember that? System unit. Whereas, with a laptop, we've got everything built into one device, and this is why a lot of people go for the laptops, simply because of the convenience that's associated with it. But, again, it depends on what you are going to be doing with the device. It doesn't matter if you have a desktop or laptop, it just depends on what you are going to be doing with it.