Monte started the class by talking to the students about the Internet. He explained how the Internet works. After the class made several guesses, Albert and Monte explained how computers communicate with each other. The computers send "packets" of information through phone lines via "routers." To demonstrate how the Internet works, Monte separated the students into teams and Albert handed each team a few slips of paper. The teams pretended to be computers, and the interns pretended to be routers. The teams wrote down a secret phrase coded in ASCII on some slips of paper and called the slips of paper packets. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Then, they would send their code to another team by giving the paper with the code to a "router," who would take it over to the next team. When a team received packets from another team, they tried to decode them. But the messages didn't always make sense. So that the messages would make sense, Albert had teams number the packets in the order they should be decoded.