How do touchscreens work?

The explanation of the sensing hardware is interesting, but the chip that magically turns the sensor's input into a poop emoji is glossing over _a lot_ of details. Obviously jumping straight to the full, actual details would be ridiculously overwhelming, but in my opinion it would have been more meaningful to explain that the chip hooked up to the sensor turns the input into information about where the touch is -- X, Y coordinates, size of touch and intensity of touch -- and then _that_ information is passed to the processor which can decide that a touch at a particular place on the screen _means_ a poop emoji. Also, that binary you listed out isn't the actual character code, it's encoded in a special format created to let older systems support more than 255 unique characters. I looked it up and as a straight number, the poop emoji (official name "Pile of Poop") is U+1F4A9, which in binary is 00000000 0000001 11110100 10101001. When computers talk to each other, they usually use a different "encoding" called UTF-8, and what you showed is the poop emoji in UTF-8 -- but the computer can't directly process the data in that form, because the bits of actual data are spread out unevenly across bytes and different characters can be different numbers of bytes long. A magical touch-to-emoji chip wouldn't be producing the encoded form directly, as that's only used when going "over the wire" to servers and the like.