ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Computation

Computation is like counting or doing math problems but with the help of a computer! It's when we ask the computer to solve a problem or do some work for us. For example, if we want to know what 2+2 equals, we can ask a computer to compute it and it will tell us that the answer is 4.

But computers don't just do simple math problems, they can do much more complicated things too, like figuring out how to get from one place to another using a map or predicting the weather based on data.

Computers use special languages, called programming languages, to understand what we want them to do. It's kind of like teaching a robot to understand our commands. We write the commands in the programming language and the computer follows them to do what we want.

Computers are very good at computation because they can do it very quickly and accurately, which helps us solve problems and make decisions much faster than we could by hand.