CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
This century has witnessed the transformation of the human society from the industrial age to information age. The volume of information that circulates in an economy is now a measure of the level of advancement of any economy. Industries enjoy relative advantage over their competitors if they have monopoly of some classes of business information. Nation is stronger than others because they have more information. It is therefore, not surprising that government and private business organizations invest significant proportion of their budget in information technology. The computer plays a central role in the acquisition, processing, storage, dissemination, and use of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information. The use of computer has revolutionized the way we do business, study, work, and social activities and so on, as well as continue to touch and change our daily lives in a profound way. So significant is the impact of computer that it is regarded as an enabling technology, the facilitator of change and the creator of hitherto unimaginable possibilities.
According to Okolo (2007), the critical analysis of the definition of computer, performs three devises that qualify it as a computer;
i. Receiving input as data.
ii. Processing the received data.
iii. Providing the processed data as information.
Therefore, a person’s skills in using computer system will largely determine his or her values in workforce in coming decades. Computer literacy is already beginning to create a great impact on career opportunities as ordinary literacy did in the past.
Okolo defined computer literacy as a way of being able to tell a computer to do what one wants it to do through operation. For one to tell a computer what to do for him or her, the person must understand exactly what he or she wants. Then for the computer to perform the operational task given to it effectively, the operator has to go through the information before he or she could confirm it.
Therefore, for one to be able to instruct the computer to do certain work for him or her, he or she must know and understand computer language such as; programming languages. No one can use computer without giving it instruction, which is programming it. We should understand that programming skills work together with computer operation from the backbone of computer literacy.
Okolo (2007), defined computer as an electronic gadget or device that accepts data as an input and processed the data electronically to produce the desired output or information with the aid of a set of instructions. A computer machine requires some means of accepting data called input port. Somewhere to store the data called memory, somewhere to keep the sequence of operations to be manipulating the data or performing the circulation called the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) and finally, a method of telling the result of the calculation.
These facilities are common to all computing machine regardless of the task the machine is used for.