Hardware and software — Technology, 7–10 years
Computers need both things you can touch and instructions you can run. Seeing how they work together makes technology less mysterious.
Two kinds of computer things
Hardware is the part of technology you can touch, such as a keyboard, screen or battery. Software is the set of instructions that tells the hardware what to do, such as opening a game or playing a song.
Why do we need both?
A keyboard alone cannot save a picture, and a game program cannot show anything without a screen. People needed machines that could be changed for many jobs, so they made reusable hardware and replaceable software work together.
Opening a drawing app
First, you tap the app icon on the screen. The software reads your tap, asks the processor to open the drawing tools, and sends pictures to the screen; then the screen, which is hardware, shows them. When you draw, the software uses the touch surface to receive your movement.
The common mix-up
It is easy to call everything inside a device “the computer”, because the parts are hidden together in one case. But a broken screen is a hardware problem, while an app that freezes may be a software problem; the two can also affect each other.
Everyday devices
This idea helps when you use a tablet, game console, camera or washing machine. Buttons, motors and screens are hardware, while the instructions controlling them are software, even when you cannot see those instructions.
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