Computer Science Education Week is held each December around the birthday of Grace Hopper, born December 9, 1906, who wrote programs for some of the first computers. Schools use the week to try coding and to learn about the people who built computing, from Ada Lovelace’s notes of 1843 to the code that helped land Apollo 11 on the moon and the World Wide Web.
Six pages of short lives. Pages 1 to 3 each have two short biographies with two questions each and one question to write about: Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper; Dorothy Vaughan, who was hired as a computer when computers were people, and Margaret Hamilton, whose team’s code kept the Apollo 11 landing going; and Jerry Lawson, whose team made a game system that played game cartridges, and Tim Berners-Lee, who made the World Wide Web. Page 4 matches six coding words to their meanings, page 5 is a timeline from 1840 to 2000 with the years printed, and page 6 a page to plan a program of your own.
Read one page a day during Computer Science Education Week, alongside an unplugged coding activity. After page 4, write a set of steps on the board with a mistake in it and ask the class to debug it. On page 6, partners can act out each other’s steps.
Read a biography together, then write the steps for something you do every day, like brushing your teeth. Follow them exactly, word for word, and look for a bug.
Short, simple biographies of six computing pioneers, from Ada Lovelace, who wrote steps for a machine in 1843, to Tim Berners-Lee, who made the World Wide Web. Children read and answer questions, match coding words to their meanings, read a timeline and plan a program of their own.
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