Educational Software for Teaching the Basics of Computer Science

In this paper we describe the visual environment for learning the basics of computer science: the binary, octal and hexadecimal numeration systems and the rules of storing the information in the computers memory. The software package is an interactive programming environment with graphical user interface that has user friendly interface and logic of usage. It offers all of the essential functions needed to understand the basics of binary, octal and hexadecimal numeration systems, the conversion between these systems and arithmetical operation with numbers in these numeration systems. The software offers also options needed to understand the two's complement code, the floating point numbers single and double precision. Another option of the software is for on-line testing of the students. This option can be use both for evaluation and self- evaluation. The software package is implemented in Java language.