Or at least “explain it like I am an 8th grader.” I am a middle school science teacher and am struggling with explaining these concepts in a simplified way that my students can understand. They have some prior knowledge about waves and how they travel. I appreciate any help you can provide!
In: 8
Digital signal is discrete in time and discrete in value.
Between the time of the two datum of digital data, we do not know what the true value is. This information is lost when the digital data is created, or doesn’t exist at all. E.g. if you take a record of temperature of the room every day, you will not know from the record what the temperature is in the middle of the day.
The value of the datum is also discrete, i.e. on the record it’s always one of a per-determined set of values. A real value is recorded by approximately choosing from that set of values, whichever closest. Information is also lost here.
If we use music as an example. Digital audio only has 44100 datum per second. What it sounds like in between the datum is not known and can only be guessed with some assumptions. Each datum can only vary among 65536 values, even if most of the time it won’t be an accurate representation of the real values.
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