What does trade-off mean?

While going through the last part of this lesson where the students are asked to provide a 300 word response to the prompt about the trade-offs in representing information as digital data, I found that it was difficult for many of the students to relate to the concept of a trade-off in general. This despite the fact that the trade-offs in space vs time for many computing problems were highlighted 3 or 4 lessons back as far as compression and encoding, etc. Had anyone else seen this as well ?

@wingchoi
I think my students focused on the limitations based on decisions. For example, I encode a name in ASCII for up 10 characters. What happens for names longer than that? Or, is it even possible to encode the full experience? What aspects of the experience will be ‘lost’? Definitely my $0.02.
Andrea

I am planning to use this video to help explain “trade-off” in general to my students. Only until 1:26 of it. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trade+offs.

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Can I ask what video in particular?

Here is the actual link:Trade-offs and opportunity costs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpSCvu68rI&t=88s

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