🔧 Lab 01 — Meet Your Own Machine

Goal: find the chef, the counter, and the pantry inside the device you’re holding right now — and write your name the way a computer would.

You need: your phone or any laptop, plus a pen and paper for Part 3. Nothing to install. Nothing to sign up for. You cannot break anything in this lab — we are only looking.

Part 1 — Find your device’s specs (10 minutes)

Every device will tell you what’s inside it. Let’s go find out. Pick the section that matches your device and follow the numbered steps. Menu names vary slightly between versions and brands — if a name doesn’t match exactly, look for the closest one.

On an iPhone or iPad

  1. Open the Settings app (the gray gear icon).
  2. Tap General, then tap About.
  3. Look for Model Name (e.g. “iPhone 13”) and Capacity (e.g. “128 GB”). Capacity is your storage — the pantry.
  4. Apple doesn’t show RAM or chip name in Settings. That’s fine: type your model name plus the word “specs” into any search engine, and the RAM (e.g. “4 GB”) and chip (e.g. “A15”) appear in the first results.

On an Android phone

  1. Open the Settings app.
  2. Scroll to the bottom and tap About phone.
  3. You should see the device name, and often RAM (e.g. “6 GB”) and Internal storage (e.g. “128 GB”) right there. On some phones, storage details live under Settings → Storage instead.
  4. The chip name may be listed under “Processor”. If not, search your phone’s model name plus “specs” to find it.

On a Windows laptop

  1. Click the Start button, then the Settings gear.
  2. Go to System, then scroll down to About.
  3. Look at Installed RAM (e.g. “8 GB”) and Processor (e.g. an “Intel Core” or “AMD Ryzen” chip name).
  4. For storage: in Settings, search for “Storage” — you’ll see something like “256 GB, 180 GB used”.

On a Mac

  1. Click the Apple menu () in the top-left corner of the screen.
  2. Click About This Mac.
  3. You’ll see the Chip (e.g. “Apple M2”) and Memory (that’s RAM, e.g. “8 GB”).
  4. For storage, click More Info (or the Storage tab on older Macs) to see something like “512 GB”.

✅ What you should see: three numbers, whatever your device — a RAM size (probably between 4 and 32 GB), a storage size (probably between 64 GB and 1 TB), and a chip name. Write all three down. If you found them: congratulations, you have officially read a spec sheet.

Part 2 — Interpret the numbers like an engineer (5 minutes)

Now translate your three numbers using Module 01’s kitchen:

  1. Your RAM number is the size of the kitchen counter. More RAM = more apps can be “on the counter” at once without the chef shuffling things back to the pantry. Notice how much smaller it is than your storage — counters are expensive; pantries are cheap.
  2. Your storage number is the size of the pantry. A quick sense of scale: one photo is roughly 3 MB (megabytes), and 1 GB is about 1,000 MB. So “128 GB” is room for very roughly 40,000 photos. How many photos would your pantry hold?
  3. Your chip name is your chef. Search the chip name plus “how many cores” if you’re curious how many chefs are actually in your kitchen. (Most phones today: 6–8.)

✅ What you should see: your storage is many times larger than your RAM — usually 20 to 50 times larger. If yours fits that pattern, you’ve confirmed the counter-vs-pantry tradeoff with real hardware: fast space is scarce, slow space is plentiful.

Part 3 — Watch the counter fill up (10 minutes)

RAM isn’t a fixed fact — it’s a workspace in constant use. Let’s watch it move.

On a Windows laptop

  1. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc together. A window called Task Manager opens — a live dashboard of everything your computer is doing. If it looks tiny, click More details.
  2. Click the Performance tab, then click Memory in the left list. You’ll see a moving graph: this is your kitchen counter, live. Note the “In use” number.
  3. Now open a browser and open five or six tabs with different websites. Watch the “In use” number climb — each tab is claiming counter space.
  4. Close the tabs. Watch the number drift back down as the counter is cleared.

On a Mac

  1. Press Cmd + Space, type “Activity Monitor”, and press Enter.
  2. Click the Memory tab. The list shows every running program and how much counter space each is using; the “Memory Used” figure at the bottom is the total.
  3. Open several browser tabs, watch the numbers rise; close them, watch them fall.

On an Android phone

  1. Open Settings and search for “Memory” (on many phones it’s under Device care / Battery and device care, or inside Developer options on some models — if you can’t find it, skip to the “no dashboard” note below).
  2. You’ll see something like “5.1 GB / 6 GB used” — a live counter report.

On an iPhone (and any phone without a memory dashboard)

iPhones don’t show a RAM dashboard, and that’s a deliberate design choice — the system manages the counter for you. Instead, try this: open ten apps in a row, then go back to the first one. If it reloads from scratch instead of resuming instantly, you’ve caught the system clearing old apps off the counter to make room. That reload is RAM management, visible with no tools at all.

âś… What you should see: memory usage that rises when you open things and falls when you close them. You have now watched the kitchen counter in action.

Part 4 — Write your initials in binary (10 minutes, pen and paper)

The lesson said letters are stored as numbers, and numbers as 0s and 1s. Prove it by writing your own initials the way your computer does.

Computers use an agreed code called ASCII (a standard table that gives every letter, digit, and symbol its own number). Here are the capital letters:

Letter Number Binary   Letter Number Binary
A 65 01000001   N 78 01001110
B 66 01000010   O 79 01001111
C 67 01000011   P 80 01010000
D 68 01000100   Q 81 01010001
E 69 01000101   R 82 01010010
F 70 01000110   S 83 01010011
G 71 01000111   T 84 01010100
H 72 01001000   U 85 01010101
I 73 01001001   V 86 01010110
J 74 01001010   W 87 01010111
K 75 01001011   X 88 01011000
L 76 01001100   Y 89 01011001
M 77 01001101   Z 90 01011010
  1. Write your initials at the top of the paper. (Example: “R.K.”)
  2. For each initial, find its row and copy the 8-digit binary pattern. Example: R = 01010010, K = 01001011.
  3. Look at what you wrote. Each 1 is a switch turned on; each 0 is a switch turned off. Sixteen tiny switches, and they spell you.
  4. Bonus: check one letter by hand. The positions in a byte are worth 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 (left to right). For R = 01010010: the “on” positions are 64, 16, and
    1. Add them: 64 + 16 + 2 = 82. Look at the table — R is 82. It checks out.

✅ What you should see: your initials as two rows of eight 0s and 1s, and (if you did the bonus) the addition confirming the code. Every text message you have ever sent was stored exactly like this — a byte per character, switches all the way down.

🎉 Done!

You found the chef, measured the counter and the pantry, watched the counter fill and empty, and hand-encoded your name into the machine’s native language. Next stop: the quiz, then Module 02.