Monday, May 21, 2018

Teaching the History of Computing

History is important. We’ve all heard, if not quoted, the adage that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Mark Guzdial has a blog post (Computer science education is far bigger than maker education) that is almost as much a history lesson as it is an argument for the maker movement as covering only a subset of computer science. In his post, he talks about the big ideas developed by Alan Turing , Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, and Grace Hopper.
“What Lovelace and Hopper did mattered, and we demonstrate that it mattered by teaching it and explaining why it’s important.”
One of the things we talk about in the course we teach freshmen at my school is the history of computing. Names like Turing , Lovelace, and Hopper come up along with many others. That is good as far as it goes but lately I have been thinking we need to talk history in more courses. How did we get to where we are and how and why?

Erik Meijer, the Dutch computer scientist, told me once that if I wanted to know what the next big thing in computing is going to be I should look at what  was the big thing in computing 20 years in the past. It’s true. Things in computing do move in cycles. I look at the way we do screen/form design now and see ideas I first saw in the Trax operating system in 1978. Cloud based computing is similar to the days when we had remote terminals connected to large mainframes. The whole idea of client/server applications keeps getting reinvented and redeveloped.

The past is a good place to look for new ideas and we forget that are our peril. My students once asked me how I “learned all this stuff” after a history lesson. I replied that I didn’t learn it – I lived it. A lot has happened in the 45 years since my first computer science class as a university student. I’ve gotten to meet and talk to some important people in the development of CS over those years.

But what about new teachers? How will they learn the history of computing? Is it taught in university? I suspect not much of it is being taught. What ideas will be missed because of a lack of historical knowledge and perspective? Am I the only one worried about this?

[Now get off my grass.]


Garth said...

One of the required course for my Math Ed degree was a Math History course. Very difficult but very worth while. It demonstrated where a lot of the math from the last 200 - 300 years that fills out math books today originally came from. When we teach math we rarely look at the origins of that math; Egyptian, Babylonian, etc. This is a mistake. The same applies to CS. Understanding origins can be extremely useful in developing futures.

Mike Zamansky said...

When I started teaching at Stuy there was a "History of Math" class. Unfortunately, it was the class kids took if they didn't like math so it was something of a dumping ground.

When I took my limited Ed credits for my license all the programs I looked at offered "History of Math" but now, at least in NY. most ed programs use a cohort model with less freedom to choose classes and I haven't seen History of Math offered in a long time.

It's a shame. It's more valuable and useful than most of the stuff required to become a certified math teacher in NY State.

I think that "standards" and Common Core more so is also partly to blame - not much subject history there.

Doug said...

Interesting comments here. I also took a History of Mathematics course. I would it most interesting and am so glad that I took it. Yes, if I recall correctly, it wasn't the easiest of classes and made us appreciate the mathematics concepts discovered at that time and with the tools of that time.

The history of computing is an interesting topic and I don't know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that our school library had a great deal of resources for it.

You could certainly put it in context just by doing a history of the smartphone in the past few years to give a concrete example of how technology is breaking ahead at light speed.