You shouldn't need them. All characters and other integer types are implicitly 0's and 1's. 

For example, a char with the value of 8 is 0x08 = 00001000.

If you need to access a specific bit and set it to a given value, you can use the bit shift operator. For example, to change the above character to a value of 10, you could do: val | (0x01 << 1) = 00001000 | 00000010 = 00001010

I would prefer that you didn't use a bitset.  It's better if you figure out how the bitwise operations work because it might be something you need to know for the future.

I would rather someone come to office hours and ask for help with the bitwise operations.

Also check out this article

Bit Masking