Programming Patch Secret

At the Scout Shop today, I saw the new Programming merit badge patch. It was a pretty boring looking patch, to tell the truth. Kind of bland shades of green in the green border, and no picture of a computer, or any electronic device.

But, if you have an old school programming degree ( like me :-) ), you would recognize that the image is actually three highlighted strings of 1s and 0s - that's Binary code and each digit is called a BIT.
There are eight digits in each of the three highlighted lines - 8 bits make a BYTE.

Looking up the three BYTES in this chart, shows them to be the ASCII codes for B - S - A
Now, I thought that was pretty clever and could be a fun tidbit to start out with when counseling for this badge.



Oh, I bought the Programming merit badge pamphlet at the shop since I hope to counsel for this one, and on page 14, there is more info about this visually plain but thoughtfully done patch.

Scout On