Mitch, apologies if this sounds patronising, but if you have a young relative or neighbour, they might just be the one to help. Here in the UK, computer science is part of the schools national curriculum. Let me tell you an amusing story and you might get the gist of my advice.
There's a thirteen-year-old who lives next door, one evening, he and his mother ring my doorbell. The young fellow looks a tad sheepish, he is having trouble with his mathematics homework, did I know anything about quadratic equations? Yes I did, I invited them in, to the mother's surprise I dug out my school text book, I throw nothing out, refreshed my memory and then went through his homework, job done.
A year or so later the same scenario, only this time he's really struggling with the binary system. Out comes my text book, I explained to him that he has to forget adding to the power of ten. Binary works on two digits, zero and one. We go through his homework and he starts to grasp the concept. He then asks, what's the point of counting to one and then going back to zero.
I asked if he had heard of Morse code, of course he had. I told him that Morse is a form of binary, not exactly, but it does use dots and dashes instead of zero and one. Then I asked if he had ever seen the tape the came out of a printer with holes in it. Yes he had, that's binary, but instead of zero and one, it's hole, no hole. He thought about it. Then I said that binary forms the basis of a computer system by replacing zero and one with pulse, no pulse. The light came on, his face lit up. He romped through his homework.
"How come," he asked, "if you know all that, why did I have to program your phone for you?" "That's a very good question," I replied as I bid him and his mother, "goodnight."
