Media Editing Lesson Plan
Lesson: 3 - Data Measurement, compressed and uncompressed file formats.

Purpose: Students should learn data measurement and size of files. Students will learn compressed file formats and uncompressed file formats. They will also touch upon lossy and lossless compressions.

No. of. Classes

1 - (Time : 1:30 minutes, Laptops/desktops : 10, Students strength : 15 to 20).

Materials Required

Laptops/desktops.

Curriculum Content 1.2) Data Measurement, 1.3) File size,
1.5) Compressed vs uncompressed file formats
Prior knowledge

Students should know about file, file extension and network.

Exercises

Exercise: 1

1.a) Learn about data measurement.
1.b) Find out the size of the image in the solution folder.
1.c) Learn to convert 2 MB to GB and 2048 KB to MB.

Instruction:
  1. See the instruction video for exercise - 1.a
  2. See the instruction video for exercise - 1.b
  3. See the instruction video for exercise - 1.c

Exercise: 2

Compress files/folders and see the impact of it. Use the given few compressed file formats for this exercise.

Instruction:
  1. See the Instruction video for exercise - 2

Exercise: 3

If we compress a file/folder will its size decrease or increase? How does it decrease? Try compressing different types of files. See how there is a wide variation in how much it compresses. Try both winzip and winrar to compress. If on a Linux system you can also try gzip. Show that the size of the resulting file is different.

Instruction:
  1. See the Instruction video for exercise - 3

Exercise: 4

Create a BMP file (with Paint?). Convert it to jpg. See the compression. Zoom and show that they are not exactly the same! You may also do Wav to MP3 conversion. Understand about lossy compressions in this exercise.

Instruction:
  1. See the Instruction video for exercise - 4
  2. See the other Instruction video for exercise - 4
Teacher's Instruction
  1. Ask the students to convert KB to MB, MB to GB, GB to TB vice versa.
  2. Ask them whether they understood bits and bytes.
  3. How 2^10 = 1024 which is close to 1000 and these two numbers are used interchangeably in referring to Kilo, Mega etc.
  4. Students should be able to understand the compressed file formats and uncompressed file formats.
  5. Ask the children to think about when you would use lossy and lossless compressions. And why do you use compression in general? Teacher should explain this.
  6. Can you then think of how the various compressions work? No need to answer this question. This is well beyond this curriculum. Some broad ideas like Run-Length-Encoding and same color in proximity can be given.