How do we connect the quantum theory of atoms, photons, and electrons to the information processing power of quantum computing? What tools do we need and what features are we really using? In this session for beginners in quantum information science, we’ll overview how we take real quantum mechanical systems and use them to encode, manipulate, and process quantum bits. We’ll show how we can model a range of systems with the same simple linear algebra and get at the essence of what makes quantum bits more powerful than classical bits.