Lovelace, women's IT and QUADratic equations

When you stop and think about it - really stop and think, the foresight of Charles Babbage was astonishing, even though he did not quite achieve his objectives. What is even more amazing then is the role that Ada Lovelace played in the development of computing and scientific computing.

This post is to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. As per this post 12 months ago, I am and always will be celebrating Enid Mumford and her work on the need and importance of socio-technical insights when we attempt to apply IT in the work place*. Her work also exemplifies what women can and do contribute to IT.

In terms of the 3R's I am 'literate', but real maths evades me at least the level of ability I wish I had. Namely, the expertise to exercise some of puzzles in the social sciences.

BBC radio 4's Woman's Hour has regularly featured maths education for women and girls, bemoaning the maths abilities of the female population. Some maths has come to me through programming in BASIC, sorting, recursion, functions and using SPSS (DOS version!).

They should teach more programming in schools. Computing and maths are often equated (sorry!) and fittingly the BBC have also featured the genius of Ada Lovelace.

So all these things are connected: the pioneering insights of Ada Lovelace, the state of mathematics education for girls and how girl's are engaged in IcT today globally.

Additional links:

Gender IT: https://www.genderit.org/
Association for Progressive Communications: http://www.apc.org/
Alice innovative 3D programming environment

Image source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/01/2010_07_mon.shtml

* Jones, P. (2009) Socio-Technical Structures, the Scope of Informatics and Hodges’ model, IN, Staudinger, R., Ostermann, H., Bettina Staudinger, B. (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Nursing Informatics and Socio-Technical Structures, Idea Group Publishing, Inc.