When the class became a network in Build a Network, you were the hardware: sticky notes as packets, students as routers, and one long-suffering message trying to cross the room. The real internet is that game at planetary scale, played billions of times a second.
Messages travel as packets
A message is not sent whole. It is chopped into packets — small, numbered pieces, each stamped with its destination address — that travel separately and may not even take the same route. The receiving device reassembles them in order, asks again for any that went missing, and hands the finished message upward. You never see the seams.
The journey
Your phone speaks wifi to the router in the wall, or cellular to a tower down the street. Either way the packets reach your internet provider, then hop between routers — each one reading the address and passing the packet along, exactly like the students in the middle of the room — until they arrive at a server: a computer whose whole job is to answer requests. The reply makes the same trip in reverse, and a round trip across an ocean takes well under a second.
Self-check: trace a text to a friend across town
Before expanding this, list every stop you can name. Roughly: your phone → wifi router or cell tower → your provider’s network → several routers → the messaging company’s server → your friend’s provider → their phone. Two phones ten metres apart often still route through a server in another country.
Always on: the trade
Constant connectivity is genuinely wonderful — video calls with a grandparent, maps that reroute around traffic, Finding Answers Online the moment you are stuck. The costs are real too: every connected hour generates data about you, attention drifts wherever notifications pull it, and communities without coverage or affordable service are locked out of things the connected take for granted. The point is not to disconnect — it is to know what the connection costs and to decide on purpose.
Curriculum connection
B4.2
investigate hardware and methods used to establish networks and connectivity, and assess the benefits and limitations of increased connectivity with reference to everyday life
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