What does this system need to work?
Labs / General Knowledge
How Wi-Fi Works
Wi-Fi turns digital information into patterns carried by radio waves. A router sends those patterns through the air, and your device decodes them back into data.
Labs / General Knowledge / How Wi-Fi Works
How Wi-Fi Works
Wi-Fi turns digital information into patterns carried by radio waves. A router sends those patterns through the air, and your device decodes them back into data.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Everyday objects can seem mysterious until we separate them into simple parts. This model lets you change one factor and see how the whole system responds.
Explore
Try the model
77% signal
The radio signal is strong enough to carry data reliably.
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Move farther from the router. How quickly does the signal fall?
- Add walls one at a time. Which matters more here: one wall or ten extra metres?
- Find a combination where the connection becomes unreliable.
- Why can moving a router into an open, central position improve a whole home?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Describe the system as a simple chain: what goes in, what changes inside, and what comes out. Use one observation from the model as evidence.
Check
Before you leave
Which change had the biggest effect?
How would you explain it to someone else?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.