[dbrowning]

16/03/2013 at 4:24 pm

Hi folks, I’m working on some materials for N5 and I’m looking at the email that was sent from Derek Middleton to Brian Macdonald regarding questions Brian had. Derek mentions pupils will have to know about mantissa and exponent with regards to floating point numbers. Can anyone give me any information on either what they are teaching with regards to this or the level that they are going into?

Could get somewhat involved and don’t want to unnecessarily burden kids.

Thanks

Dave

[pliddle34]

18/03/2013 at 8:21 am

I’m sticking to Int2 level. They must know that FP number is made of two parts, called mantissa and exponent. They also need to know that the mantissa holds the detail of the number (so increasing its storage size results in more precision) and that the exponent is used as a multiplier to move the mantissa to the correct “size” (so increasing its storage size results in a larger range of possible numbers)

[dbrowning]

18/03/2013 at 11:33 am

OK, that makes sense. Thanks