What are instruction cycles?

An instruction cycle is like the steps a robot takes to follow your commands, one by one, just like you do when you're playing a game.

Imagine you have a toy robot that helps you clean up your room. Every time you tell it to pick up a block or move to a new spot, it goes through a little routine: it hears the command, thinks about what to do next, and then acts on it. That whole process, hearing the command, thinking, and acting, is like one instruction cycle.

Let’s say you tell your robot, “Pick up the red block.” First, it listens, that’s like fetching the instruction. Then it checks where the red block is, this is like decoding what it needs to do. Finally, it moves and grabs the block, that's the execution part.

Each time your robot does one of these little jobs, it goes through an instruction cycle, just like how you go through steps when you're playing a game or doing a puzzle. The more instructions it gets, the more cycles it does, and the faster it works!