What's the fastest way to find one name in a giant sorted list?
Hunting for one friend in a long class roster, or watching a phone find a contact the instant you start typing — does it really read every name, or is there a shortcut?
Talk about it
- Pick a number between 1 and 100. Have your child guess it while you only say 'higher' or 'lower' — count how few guesses it takes when they always guess the middle.
- Look up a name in a phone's contacts together. The phone finds it instantly among thousands — ask how it could possibly check that fast.
- Open a dictionary to find one word. Do you flip page by page from the front, or jump to the middle and narrow in? Notice which is faster.