Binary Number Game

I woke up this morning thinking about what to do with my year 13 class since they have finsihed tehre work for the year. I was going to do some office application stuff, but then thought of a comment one of the students made, this was around teh fact that the juniors are doing harder work that than the year 13 students at present. The year 11 stduents now have papers to do on Computer Science., Lucky that a tweet came through this morning with a binary number game mentioned in it.
So a lesson plan was born,
Work through simple binary
00001 = 0
00010 = 1
10101 = 21
01010 = 10
01100 = 12
10111 = 23
11111 = 31
00101 = 5
00000 = 0
10010 = 18

01000 = h
00101 = e
01100 = l
01100 = l

01111 = o

Then get the students to create a message for someone else.

Then to the challenge, what can you get up to in the binary number game... http://forums.cisco.com/CertCom/game/binary_game_page.htm

My score is currently 20500, one of the students reached 26000

Inspired from

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/archive/2008/09/11/binary-number-game.aspx