It's 1983,

the C64 just hit the market with a pricetag of 1500 Deutsche Mark.
You are young and have no chance of ever having such a computer. Not even under the christmas tree if you tell your parents you need it for school.

The first television show about Computers was called "Computerclub" and one of the hosts, Wolfgang Back, invented with his colleague Ulrich Rohde a simulator for a Computer. On a sheet of paper.
It was completely for educational purposes, to show young people how computers actually work and how they are programmed.

The memory content was set by hand with matches or coins, the program was written by hand. Your program counter was a pencil. Easy to handle, easy to replicate and available for everybody. The show printed 300.000 sheets with the Papiercomputer. And it was widely used in education back then.

My own school had some C64's later, in 1988 I think. But in 1983 there were absolutely no computers available in germany.

How does this even work?

As told, you have memory (matches in the "Datenregister"), a Program with line numbers, and 5 commands:
inc - increase the content of a Datenregister and go on with the next program line
dec - well, guess
jmp - jump to a Program line
isz - is the content of a Dataregister 0? If yes, lump 2 forward in the program, if not, go on with the next program line.
stp - stop the computer. Your program is finished.

This worked quiet well. You could easily add or subtract, multiply or divide. Wolfgang Back told, they even calculated the sine curve (on 28 sheets of paper).

You want to have deeper infos or give it a try?
Visit Marian Aldenhövels site and play around yourself.

Here you find the empty Papiercomputer:
klick

Here is a Simulator and sample programs (in the ZIP file):
https://kroegerama.com/development/windows/know-how-computer

Here are Dave‘s excellent simulators for the C16 and the C64:
https://www.vanportmedia.com/PAL-1/cbm/

And here‘s a longer video about it (featuring me):
https://youtu.be/y5nKG2vfoQI?si=xNipox5PPnCZ-Q73

Stay childish!