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FDE BINARY

Interactive animations & tools for learning computer science — from electricity and logic gates up to algorithms, data structures and a working CPU. Vanilla HTML & Canvas, no installs.

1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1
01 — SIGNALS

Bits → Colour → Sound

Electricity pulses from a power source through logic gates, building an 8-bit byte that becomes a colour and a musical note. Flip inputs by hand and watch the value change.

logic gatesWeb Audiomanual mode
Launch animation →
FETCH DECODE EXEC
02 — PROCESSOR

The FDE Cycle

A Von Neumann CPU runs a tiny program. Step through every micro-operation as data flows across colour-coded buses between RAM, the registers (PC, MAR, MDR, CIR, ACC) and the ALU.

RAMregistersALUsingle-step
Launch animation →
▁▃▂▅▄▇▆█
03 — ALGORITHMS

Sorting Visualiser

Watch bubble, insertion, selection, merge and quick sort rearrange an array bar-by-bar. Live comparison and swap counts, with play, step and speed controls.

5 algorithmsstep modecounters
Launch animation →
LINEAR vs BINARY
04 — ALGORITHMS

Linear vs Binary Search

Two searches race on the same sorted array. See why linear is O(n) and binary is O(log n) by comparing how many cells each one checks to find (or miss) the target.

side-by-sideBig-Opresent/absent
Launch animation →
● → → → ◆
05 — ALGORITHMS

Pathfinding

Draw walls on a grid and watch BFS, DFS, Dijkstra and A* search for a route. See how A* heads toward the goal and explores far fewer cells than blind search.

4 algorithmseditable mazeA* heuristic
Launch animation →
1011 + 0110
06 — NUMBERS

Binary Arithmetic

Add and subtract numbers bit by bit, watching carries ripple from the LSB. Subtraction shows the two's-complement trick (A + NOT B + 1), plus bitwise AND/OR/XOR and shifts, with carry and overflow flags.

carriestwo's complementoverflow flag
Launch animation →
2 · 8 · 10 · 16
07 — NUMBERS

Bases & ASCII

Click bits to build a number and see it in binary, denary, hex and octal simultaneously, with the place-value sum spelled out. Then encode any text into bytes.

place valuehex / octaltext → bytes
Open tool →
A → D ⊕
08 — SECURITY

Cipher Explorer

Encrypt and decrypt with the Caesar shift (and crack it by brute-forcing all 25 shifts), then see how an XOR key scrambles bytes and unscrambles them when applied twice.

Caesarbrute-forceXOR
Open tool →
fib(n)
09 — ALGORITHMS

Recursion Call Tree

Watch factorial and Fibonacci unfold as a tree of calls and returns, with a live call stack. Toggle memoisation to see Fibonacci stop recomputing the same subproblems.

call stackmemoisationbase cases
Launch animation →
STACK · QUEUE · BST
10 — DATA STRUCTURES

Stack · Queue · BST

Push and pop a LIFO stack, enqueue and dequeue a FIFO queue, and build a binary search tree — then animate in-order, pre-order and post-order traversals and value search.

LIFO / FIFOtreetraversals
Launch animation →
AND · OR · XOR
11 — HARDWARE

Logic Gates & Adder

Explore every gate through its truth table, then toggle inputs on a live full-adder circuit and watch signals light up the wires as gates combine to add three binary digits.

truth tablesfull adderlive wires
Open tool →
INP·ADD·OUT
12 — PROCESSOR

Little Man Computer

Write real assembly, assemble it into numbered mailboxes, and run it instruction by instruction — watching the accumulator, program counter and memory change. The programmable sequel to the FDE cycle.

assemblerstep debuggerlabels
Open tool →
PC · MAR · MDR · CIR
13 — PROCESSOR

Little Man FDE Cycle

Load an assembly program and follow the Little Man as he carries values between the registers, the ALU and memory along the buses, one micro-step at a time, with a quiz mode that asks what happens next.

GCSE J277register transfersquiz mode
Open tool →
0.1011000 × 20011
14 — NUMBERS

Floating Point Workbench

Two's complement mantissa and exponent the OCR way: convert both directions step by step, normalise, add and subtract in binary, and see the range-versus-precision trade-off, with exam-style practice.

A Level H446normalisationarithmetic
Open tool →
grid[row, col]
15 — DATA STRUCTURES

2D Array Workbench

Click cells to read their indexes, then trace nested-loop algorithms line by line as the grid lights up. GCSE and A Level modes, OCR Exam Reference Language or Python, memory layout, exam questions and a quiz.

J277 + H446code tracerERL / Python
Open tool →
new Account(...)
16 — PROGRAMMING

OOP Workbench

Instantiate bank account objects and call their methods, trace a constructor, test encapsulation, follow method lookup through inheritance and run a polymorphic loop, in OCR pseudocode or Python.

A Level H446encapsulationinheritancepolymorphism
Open tool →
HTML · CSS · JS
17 — WEB

Web Technologies Workbench

Inspect a page's source, build CSS rules live, and write JavaScript that really runs against a mini page with every DOM call traced. Covers the OCR tag and property lists, client versus server, exam questions and a quiz.

A Level H446live playgroundclient vs server
Open tool →