THE LEARNING OF MEASUREMENT UNITS FOR BINARY INFORMATION – A SURPRISINGLY PROBLEMATIC TOPIC FOR THE BULGARIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM

For decades SI prefixes have been used incorrectly in the IT world to define volumes of binary information. Kilo, mega, giga, etc. were widely accepted all over the world for powers of 2 instead of powers of 10. The introduction of new binary information prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. started in 1999. This change was proved difficult, because the old prefixes already gained very wide adoption in the society. Most hardware and software manufacturers refused to use the new units of measurement, probably because it was not profitable for them from marketing point of view. Some software companies even refused to start measuring correctly with the new values for the old prefixes. This problem was transferred into the Bulgarian education system, where the innovation was met with strong conservatism and even an outright reluctance of teachers to teach the new units. The article examines the problem from a pedagogical point of view and suggests some guidelines for effective teaching of the new units in the Information Technology curriculum for the Bulgarian schools.