DD4 would probably enjoy learning about this - she is very interested in what number everything is at the moment. I'm pretty sure that it is most likely a misunderstanding of how numbers and words relate - but anyway I think being as she's asking I might as well go with it.

Trouble is I think I did 1 day of binary (so 30 minutes) at high school 25 years ago. Being as it had no interest to my style of thought I took in nothing except it has something to do with 0's and 1's and a bit from the x files..

Anyway anyone got any suggestions as to where to start?

maybe start here

We used to play alternate counting games with different bases. Ten replaces the base number. So, counting in base five is one, two, three, four, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, twenty. In base two, binary, it is one, ten, eleven, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and eleven, etc. Tranlating to decimal you count the number of numbers you said, so in base five above twenty is ten, and in base 2 one hundred and eleven is seven.

I modified this Hour of Code activity for the summer math enrichment program I help run in our school district. It went really well. I had the students encode their names in ASCII and check them by adding the the place values in powers of two. If you PM me with an e-mail address, I can send you the worksheet I made for the activity too.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world ...

Thanks for the suggestions all - ohmathmom - I have sent you a pm.

I'm kind of excited about all the stuff I'M going to learn...