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!
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The explanations are good, but perhaps it needs a bit of elaboration. Let’s say I want to send a signal, say music. At any point in time, the waveform is at a certain value, let’s say 100. With an analog signal you just send a voltage that represents 100.
With digital you only have on and off, 0 or 1.
So to send a value of 100, you need to send the value in what is called binary representation – a series on 0s and 1s – in this case 1100100. That’s seven bits of information.
So in some senses analog is easier, you just send a value that can drive a speaker or whatever. With digital, you need to convert it into binary, send those ones and zeros and then convert it back. The advantage with digital is the because you are only dealing with ones and zeros, there is less chance of it being affected by noise and signal degradation, because on the receiving end you know it’s going to be one or zero.
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