First, we leave your computer either through a wire or maybe through a wireless network.  The first stop on our journey is a Modem.  The Modem is a little computer with one task -- to connect your house to your Internet Service Provider.  Internet Service Provider sounds pretty official, but that's just a fancy name for the company your parents or your school pays to get the internet.

 

So, once we leave your house through the modem, we travel all the way to a building where our Internet Service Provider (ISP) stores a bunch of DNS Servers.  A DNS Server is another computer, but it does something really special -- a DNS Server is able to direct us to the next place on our quest to find ScienceMonster.com!

 

So, in order for us to find ScienceMonster.com, we need directions -- an address would be great!  All servers have an address called an IP Address that is a unique combination of four numbers separated by periods.  It might look something like this:

173.192.219.215
 

So, getting Science Monster's IP address is our real goal.  Once we have the IP address for sciencemonster.com, that's it!  Our quest will be complete!  We can connect to Science Monster's server and see all of its pages.