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~5 min · materials: none

How does a phone shrink a huge photo small enough to send in a flash?

A kid watches a photo crawl as it loads, or hears a parent say 'the file's too big to text' — same picture, sometimes huge, sometimes tiny. Where does the bigness go?

Talk about it

  • Next time a photo is 'too big to text,' ask: which is bigger to store — a plain blue sky, or a picture of a crowd? Why?
  • Play it out loud: instead of saying 'red red red red red,' how could you say it in two words? ('red × 5'.)
  • Look at a photo together and find the spots that would shrink the most — the big plain areas like sky or a wall.
Watch it together

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