Paper ID #32255

Ada Lovelace: First Computer Programmer and Hacker?

Dr. Erica Haugtvedt, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology
Dr. Erica Haugtvedt is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at South Dakota School of Mines
and Technology. She received her Ph.D. in British nineteenth-century literature from Ohio State Univer-
sity in 2015. Erica Haugtvedt works on Victorian popular fiction, transfictionality, seriality, and media
history. Her publications include ”The Victorian Serial Novel and Transfictional Character” (Victorian
Studies (59.3: 2017)), ”The Ethics of True Crime: Fictionality in Serial Season One” in The Serial Pod-
cast and Storytelling in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2016), ”Sweeney Todd as Victorian Transmedial
Storyworld” and ”The Sympathy of Suspense: Gaskell and Braddon’s Slow and Fast Sensation Fiction in
Family Magazines” (both in Victorian Periodicals Review (49.1: 2016, 49.3: 2016)). Her current book
project examines the dynamics of transfictional characters in the British long nineteenth century.
Dr. Duane Lewis Abata, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
Dr. Abata has worked in academia for over forty years at universities and with the Federal government
around the country. He began his career at the University of Wisconsin, served as Associate Dean and
Dean at Michigan Technological University and then at the National Science Foundation in Washington,
D.C. as program manager in the Engineering Directorate. From 2003 to 2004, Dr. Abata was President of
the American Society for Engineering Education. Following his appointment at NSF he served as Dean
of Engineering and Engineering Technology at Northern Arizona University and Dean of Engineering
at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Dr. Abata is currently a tenured full professor in
mechanical engineering at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. His research work focuses in
the areas of energy storage and combustion.

c American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

 Ada Lovelace: First Computer Programmer and Hacker?

Erica Haugtvedt and Duane Abata

South Dakota School of Mines & Technology
Rapid City, SD

Abstract

Long before today’s pervasive digital computers, the first computer programmer and computer
hacker was arguably Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (born in 1815 as Augusta Ada
Byron, daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron). She captured the essence of Charles
Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was conceptualized by Babbage but was not constructed in
his lifetime. An exceptional mathematician, in 1843 she wrote an algorithm to accompany
Babbage’s Engine and hence is an important role model for women in Science and Engineering.
Her contribution to calculate Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical Engine has since been
successfully translated, with minor changes, to the C programming language. As a Victorian
computer programmer, it is crucial to remember that she achieved her insights through
translating between languages, people, disciplines, and between the imaginary and the real. In
doing so, Lovelace was a woman of her time, demonstrating that the intersections of her socio-
economic and gender identity allowed her to be successful despite the dominant patriarchal
scientific culture in which she worked. She is thus a valuable historical example for women
today, showing that women have long made valuable contributions to STEM. This paper
discusses how she accomplished this somewhat hidden achievement and suggests a video and
discussion activity geared toward prompting undergraduates to reframe their origin stories for
computer science to include women. In another paper, we discuss the details of her algorithm
and present a working program for use as an assignment for students in beginning computer
classes.

Einführung

In our engineering curriculum, we need to emphasize the human aspects of science and
engineering. This need is clearly recognized by our accreditation agency, ABET, which requires
a portion of the curriculum to be set aside for such exposure. In order to be creative leaders in
Science and Engineering, students need role models who have set an extraordinary precedent.
Furthermore, despite recruitment efforts, women remain a minority in engineering fields in the
U.S [1]. Psychologist Penelope Lockwood’s studies suggest that because “women face negative
stereotypes regarding their competence in the workplace, they may derive particular benefit from
the example of an outstanding woman who illustrates the possibility of overcoming gender
barriers to achieve success” [2]. In this paper, we suggest that using Ada Lovelace as an
historical role model in engineering curriculum can help female engineering and science students
revise dominant origin narratives surrounding science and engineering disciplines. Bringing
history to engineering also allows students to recognize the development of technology as
evolutionary. It allows them to understand the role of creativity in the development of
engineering and technology and to make interdisciplinary connections between their work and
the world.

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It has been argued that the first computer programmer, well before the introduction of the digital
mainframe and later the personal computer, was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. With
an exceptional background in mathematics for a woman of the time, Lovelace wrote the first
algorithm and program in 1843. She captured the essence of Charles Babbage’s Analytical
Engine, which was conceptualized by Babbage but never constructed as a working instrument
until 1991 at the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s engine by craftsmen at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View, California [3]. Lovelace is an important pioneer for women in
Science and Engineering. Her contribution to calculate Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical
Engine has since been successfully translated, with minor changes, to the C++ programming
language. Her contribution was the result of a sequence of serendipitous events that allowed
computer technology to evolve before the advent of the digital computer: most notably, Charles
Babbage first conceived of the Difference Engine, which then evolved into the Analytical
Engine, which could be programmed with punched cards similar to the successful existing
technology of the automated Jacquard Loom. Lovelace’s contribution would have been lost to
time had it not been for Babbage’s presentation of his analytical engine to an audience of
aristocratic scientists and politicians in Italy, and Lovelace’s fortuitous subsequent translation of
Luigi Menabrea’s notes from this presentation from French to English.

As a Victorian computer programmer, it is crucial to remember that she achieved her insights
through translating between languages, people, disciplines, and between the imaginary and the
real. In doing so, Lovelace was a woman of her time, adhering to behavior that was expected of
her as an aristocratic Lady. This paper discusses how she accomplished this somewhat hidden
achievement. In another paper we discuss the details of her algorithm and present a working
program for use as an assignment for students in beginning computer classes.

Ada Lovelace: A Short Biography

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate daughter of George Gordon Lord Byron, the famous poet,
peer, and politician [4]. Lord Byron achieved an immense reputation for his poetry and playboy
antics in his own lifetime and is still regarded as one of the most important British Romantic
poets. Shortly after Ada’s birth, Lord Byron separated from his wife [4]. He died tragically of
disease while fighting in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, when Ada was eight years old
[4]. In 1833, the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote of Byron’s death: “When Byron passed
away, we turned to the actual and practical career of life: we awoke from the morbid, the
dreaming, the ‘moonlight and dimness of the mind,’ and by a natural reaction addressed
ourselves to the active and daily objects which lay before us” [5]. Bulwer-Lytton’s observation
elucidates the received contrast between the dreamily Romantic and dutifully practical Victorian
ages. Lovelace was the daughter of a Romantic, who grew to adulthood in the Victorian era. Her
work likewise translates between these supposedly contrasting time periods.

The estrangement between Lovelace’s parents was bitter, and Lovelace’s mother, herself
considered a youthful prodigy in mathematics, committed herself to educating Lovelace in
mathematics and science as an antidote against Byron’s poetic influence [6]. Lovelace, however,
remained attached to the legacy of her father and would not only name her two sons Byron and
Gordon, but would request that she be buried next to her father upon her death [6]. Lovelace
rejected her mother’s opposition between mathematics and poetry. In her thirties, Lovelace wrote

2
to her mother that if she couldn’t have poetry, could not she at least have a “poetical science” [7].
Lovelace’s experience of mathematics was laden with metaphor and intuition. She valued
metaphysics equally to mathematics, seeing both as ways of exploring the “the unseen worlds
around us” [8]. Lovelace’s insight into the potentialities of mathematics beyond strict utility
allowed her to translate Babbage’s computational algorithms into a vision of programming that
anticipated what computing would become for the world.

Lovelace’s mathematical abilities began to manifest when she was 17 years old, and her interest
in mathematics would dominate her adult life [9]. Lovelace’s tutor, Augustus De Morgan,
suggested that Ada’s skill could lead her to become a “first rate eminence” [7-8]. On 8 July
1835, she married William, 8th Baron King, becoming Lady King [10]. They had three children.
Lovelace was a descendant of the extinct Barons Lovelace and in 1838, her husband was made
Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham [11], meaning Lovelace became the Countess of
Lovelace [12]. In 1834, Lovelace had met Charles Babbage at a dinner party where she heard his
ideas for a calculating machine. She was inspired by the “universality of his ideas,” which, as her
biographer Betty Toole quips, hardly anyone else was [7].

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was an accomplished scientist, but he never described his
groundbreaking Analytical Engine thoroughly in publications meant to be consumed by the
public. Born into wealth, Babbage was a regular in London Society and was educated in
Mathematics at Cambridge [13]. During the early nineteenth century, Britain was the first nation
in the world undergoing industrialization from a largely agrarian economy to one based on trade
and manufacturing [5]. Consequently, this period of imperial expansion necessitated
mathematical tables that were central to navigation, science, and engineering. These tables were
laboriously developed by hand using complicated mathematical functions, and mistakes were
known to occur in transcription as well as in calculation [14]. Babbage envisioned the use of
mechanization to reduce the fallibility of this process. See Figure 1 and Figure 2 below for
images of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, respectively.

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 Figure 1., "Ada Lovelace, 1838" by Nefi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Figure 2., Engraving of Charles Babbage dated 1833, public domain

The Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine

Previously, Babbage had conceptualized and directed, with substantial financial support from the
British government, the partial construction of his first design for a mechanical computer,

4
referred to as the ‘Difference Engine,’ that could perform relatively simple mathematical tasks
repeatedly without error [15]. In 1821, Babbage began to design his Difference Engine, a fully
mechanical machine to compute values of polynomial functions [16]. Addition and subtraction
would be used, and multiplication and division avoided, by using the method of finite
differences, thus calculations could be achieved through the use of gears, cogs, and levers [17].
Even though the mathematical design was relatively simple, the invention was made complex by
the sheer number of repetitive parts. Even though Babbage had secured government funding for
the project, the Difference Engine was never fully produced in the nineteenth century due to cost
and manufacturing difficulties. 1 Work halted in 1832, and government funding was axed in 1842
[16]. However, a small working model was produced in 1822 [16]. He later conceptualized the
improved ‘Analytical Engine’ to perform mathematical tasks but with programmable capabilities
from the 1830s through to his death in 1871.

The Analytical Engine of the 1830s was never actually constructed. Babbage envisioned for the
Analytical Engine the use of interchangeable punch cards, much like those used for complex
brocade weaving in the 1804 Jacquard Loom, to control the calculator. The Analytical Engine
could theoretically thus be “programmed,” although it is doubtful that Babbage thought of it in
the way that programming is used in today’s context. Babbage planned for a loop (or sequence)
of Jacquard’s punched cards to control the function of the mechanical calculator, which could
then use the results of preceding computations [19-20]. In addition to loop control, Babbage also
foresaw sequential control and branching (or decision making). Arguably, Babbage’s Analytical
Engine represents the transition from mechanized arithmetic (addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division) to fully-fledged general-purpose computation (loop, sequential
control, and branching) of today, although as the Computer History Museum notes, there is no
continual line of development from Babbage’s engines to the computers of today [15]. This
invention of a punch-card programmable Analytical Engine constitutes Babbage’s claim to be a
computer pioneer [18].

Notably, Babbage’s inspiration, the Jacquard Loom, had been used to weave silk brocade in
Lyons, France for decades. Lovelace herself had been impressed by automated looms when she
toured the British Industrial midlands with her mother; she wrote in a letter dated September 1,
1834, “This Machinery reminds me of Babbage and his gem of all mechanism” [6]. Babbage
himself would make the connection between the Analytical Engine and the Jacquard Loom in his
notes on June 30, 1836 [21]. A key element of Babbage’s innovation was borrowed from an
entirely different purpose and context. See Figure 3, below, for an example of woven fabric
made possible by the use of Jacquard head adapted to a dobby loom.

1
Some parts of the Difference Engine prototype from the nineteenth century survive in the Museum of the History
of Science, Oxford [30]. In 1991, a functioning Difference Engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans.
Built to tolerances achievable in the nineteenth century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's
machine would have worked. His design was finally constructed in 1989–1991, using his plans and nineteenth-
century manufacturing tolerances. It performed its first calculation at the Science Museum, London, returning results
to 31 digits. A second Difference Engine, also constructed by the Science Museum, is owned by the technology
multimillionaire Nathan Myhrvold and is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California
[31-33]. There are some differences between the two engines: Myhrvold's engine is the first design by Babbage, and
the Science Museum's engine is one of Babbage's later designs.

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 Figure 3. Woven pattern in fabric made possible by the use of a “Jacquard
head” adapted to a dobby loom.

Operation of the Jacquard Loom is best observed rather than described. It involves a series of
control rods that encounter a flat plate called the “Jacquard head” during the looming process.
The Jacquard head has punched holes that either allow or block the rods as they move in and out
during the loom stroke. Each rod, if allowed to pass through the Jacquard head, acts upon a small
hook on the end that grasps a thread of different colored fabric and the weave is completed with
a shuttle. The Jacquard head is mechanically changed every weave row, thus the Jacquard head
along with the array of punched cards provide intricate pre-programmed patterns of different
thread in the woven fabric [22]. Interestingly, the Jacquard head was conceptualized around 1843
while treadle looms were commonplace, but the head was not adopted for roughly 40 years when
dobby looms, or large floor looms used in the mass production of woven fabric, were placed in
use. Because of the usefulness, the “Jacquard head” was built to adapt to many different dobby
looms, essentially revolutionizing the weaving industry [21-24].

Translation and Metaphor as an Avenue to Discovery

Babbage was deeply influenced by Jacquard’s invention. Replaceable punched cards used to
control a sequence of operations is considered an important step in the history of computing
hardware although it is important to understand that the punched cards used in Jacquard’s loom
modification were really not punched cards as we know them today but rather metal plates with
carefully drilled holes which were stacked and changed as the weave patterns changed during the
weave process. The ability to change the pattern of a loom's weave could be extended to the
ability to change the movement of cogs and gears in the operation of a mechanical calculator,
allowing it to be programmed for specific operations.2 The birth of Babbage’s general-purpose

2
This punched card concept was later extended by Herman Hollerith in the late 19th century who created a punched
card tabulating machine which he used to input data for the 1890 U.S. Census. A large data processing industry
using punched-card technology was developed in the first half of the twentieth century—dominated initially by the
International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), with its line of unit record equipment. The cards were used for

6
programmable computer, then, was inspired by translating between seemingly disparate
domains. Babbage borrowed from the weaving industry, an industry that literally makes its cloth
by pulling threads together. Lovelace had noticed the connection earlier, and understood its
significance deeply: she wrote in Notes on “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” “We may say most
aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard Loom weaves
flowers and leaves” [25]. Invention was importantly achieved through analogy and translation.

Lovelace’s own contribution to computer history is itself literally borne of translation. Luigi F.
Menabrea, an Italian aristocrat and military engineer, had taken notes on the way that Babbage’s
Analytical Engine worked based on Babbage’s lectures in Turin, Italy. In 1842, Menabrea wrote
an article in French, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” explaining
the workings of the machine, but being in French, the article was inaccessible to the English
public. From 1842-1843, Lovelace translated Menabrea’s work from French to English, and in
doing so added, at Babbage’s personal encouragement, copious notes of her own original
thinking that exceeded the article itself by three times its length [7]. Lovelace completed this
translation and the original work contained in her notes as a mother of three children under eight
years old [7]. These notes contain what many consider to be the first complex computer
program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Her “prescient
comments” included predictions that such a machine as the Analytical Engine might be used to
“compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and
scientific use” [7]. Lovelace conjectured a workable program for the entirely hypothetical
machine.

Lovelace immediately saw that the applications of the Analytical Engine went beyond mere
calculation. She wrote, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of
any degree of complexity or extent” [25]. Furthermore, she saw that the operations could have
symbolic results rather than merely numerical: “by means of a few simple provisions, and
additions in arranging the mechanism, to bring out a double set of results, viz.—1st, the
numerical magnitudes which are the results of operations performed on numerical data. . . .
2ndly, the symbolical results to be attached to those numerical results” [24]. In Note G, Lovelace
gives proof to her claims by writing a program for calculating the eighth Bernoulli number,
which, as computer historian and programmer Sinclair Target discovered, contains a bug in the
transposition of two variables in the fourth operation [26]. This may have been a type-setting
error. Despite this error, Target calls Lovelace the “first programmer to deserve the title” [26].
Unlike Babbage and Menabrea, who had both written simple programs for the Analytical Engine
before Lovelace, Lovelace’s program contains both branching and looping, fundamental
operations to modern computing [26]. Lovelace’s contribution, then, is not merely derivative or
replicative of Babbage and Menabrea’s prior work but rather demonstrates her deep
comprehension of the entity that had been envisioned and extends the ideas they presented. More
than the men before her, Lovelace saw the far-reaching implications of computing. Indeed, she
was able to achieve her insight because of working between and through disparate languages,
worlds, values, and disciplines. She translated between domains.

data entry rather than programming. However, the 1944 IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator received
program instructions from a paper tape punched with holes, similar to Jacquard's string of cards. Later computers
executed programs from higher-speed memory, though cards were commonly used to load the programs into
memory. Punched cards remained in use in computing up until the mid 1980s. [21]

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Lovelace’s Historical Context and Feminist Legacy

Lovelace’s achievement has been increasingly recognized since approximately 2009, when Suw
Charman-Anderson launched “Ada Lovelace Day” to encourage people to recognize women
pioneers in science and technology [27]. Charman-Anderson chose Lovelace as the figurehead of
this movement to rewrite the story of STEM to include great women. Lovelace thus has been
celebrated increasingly in recent years as the foremother of computer programming. In these
laudatory paeans, she is often introduced as a woman ahead of her time. Indeed, this in line with
Beddoes and Berrogo’s content analysis of engineering education articles from 1995-2008, in
which they find that “the tendency of prior research has been to ‘cast women in a deficit role,
aggregating them into one category, and viewing them as ‘other’” [1 qtd. Godfrey, 2003]. The
feminist theories most often engaged in Engineering Education have been liberal feminism or
standpoint feminism, both of which risk universalizing women’s experience and implying that
the “problem” is with women and not engineering culture [1]. “Exceptional” women can break
through in the culture, but feminine-conforming women are implied to not belong. Initiatives that
focus on recruiting and retaining women into a masculinist culture without addressing the biases
and limitations of that culture risk only perpetuating the problems. Beddoes and Berrego
recommend integrating intersectional and masculinity studies approaches to feminism to
engineering education theory in order to better understand the ways that gender is constructed
and experienced within the culture of engineering and engineering education. Below, we show
that the intersections of Lovelace’s identity, along with her historical context, allowed her to
achieve her breakthroughs, therefore rewriting a male-dominated history of science and allowing
women to see themselves in origin narratives of their discipline. Ada Lovelace could not have
invented complex computer programming if she hadn’t been born into the British nineteenth
century. Instead of being a woman ahead of her time, we propose instead that Lovelace’s
achievements were because she was very much a woman of her time.

The nineteenth century is often represented as an era oppressive to women, in which the ideology
of the “Angel in the House,”—encouraging upper-class women to be tender, innocent, spiritual
and, in various degrees, submissive—dominated [5]. But the status of women in the Victorian
era was not nearly so simple, and a figure such as Ada Lovelace highlights the ways in which her
gender and socio-economic class both oppressed and privileged her during her lifetime.

The Woman Question, as the Victorians dubbed the various issues relevant to women at the time,
highlights that “proper” gendered behavior was under intense debate. Gender cannot be
separated from socio-economic class during this period: while the copious leisure of Victorian
ladies was a status symbol for the upper classes, during the mid-Victorian period, one-quarter of
England’s female population held jobs, most onerous and low-paying [5]. Lower-class women
worked hard and constantly, inside and outside the home. Meanwhile, upper-class women had
been able to find success as essayists and novelists in the public since the eighteenth century—
indeed, George Eliot’s screed against “Silly Lady Novelists” demonstrates that women wrote
copiously, although their work was often considered hackneyed and was under-valued [28].
Queen Victoria herself supported education for women beyond drawing room skills [7].
Lovelace was the fortunate recipient of a top-notch education in all subjects, but especially

8
mathematics and science. As the daughter of a Lord, and the eventual wife of a Count, Lovelace
was able to refine her intellectual talents in ways that were just not accessible to the vast majority
of the male and female population of England. 3

At the same time, Lovelace’s aristocratic position also imposed rigid expectations for her
behavior as a Lady and Countess. Some have wondered why Lovelace herself did not write a
separate article rather than merely translating Menabrea. Here, we see Lovelace’s performance of
gender causing her to defer to translation rather than original contribution. As she was expected
to in many domains, Lovelace achieved her incisive insights by acting as the handmaiden to
men’s thoughts, in this case those of Babbage and Menabrea. Despite her mastery, the ideology
of women’s submission to men relegated her contributions to secondary status, perhaps even as
dilettantism.

Although science has gained considerable cultural authority, specialization, and professionalism
today, it is salutary to remember that during the nineteenth century, such authority was in the
process of being made. Previously the domain of enthusiastic amateurs, science was becoming
distinct from natural philosophy and natural history practiced by gentlemen scholars and clerical
naturalists throughout the period [29]. The word scientist was not coined until 1833 [17]. When
“science” was the domain of hobbyists, connections between what we now see as disparate
disciplines and fields could be made readily, and such connections could produce startling
discoveries. Lovelace’s prediction regarding the possibilities for programming entailed weaving
between mathematics, technology, and the symbolic realm of culture. In a century in which
science was not yet seen as distinct from the arts and humanities, she could more easily blend
these areas of knowledge without having to overcome disciplinary barriers. Lovelace’s
intellectual pursuits as an aristocrat were on par with the pastimes of many noble and gentle men
and women similar to her rank, even if few were able to achieve original insight and invention to
the degree that Babbage and Lovelace attained. Her special interest in mathematics and science
was fairly unique for her sex at the time; yet, decades before her father had called her mother his
“Princess of Parallelograms” [6].

Conclusion: A Lesson Plan

Ada Lovelace’s position as a foremother in computing history thus offers several lessons to
contemporary women in science and engineering. First, rather than being a woman working
against or despite her context, Lovelace worked within it. This is not to say that her context did
not hinder her achievements—it clearly did. Lovelace’s program is relegated to footnotes of a
translation, after all. But there were also ways in which Lovelace was only able to achieve what
she did due to the time and circumstances in which she was born. Second, Lovelace’s position in
computing history is continually under attack as many accuse her of being a “token” in the
history of computing. It seems clear that, while Lovelace did not write the very first program, she
did write the first complex program and that this itself worth memorializing. Nor is her sex
inconsequential. It is monumental that she is an early role model for women in science and
engineering, as examples of women working within patriarchal paradigms are necessary to see
what is possible. Third, and finally, Lovelace’s achievement was a translation that wove between

3
Babbage, although not aristocratic as Lovelace was, had a degree of wealth and access to privilege that enabled
him to be educated and work in ways that were also inaccessible to most other men of the time.

9
domains, just as her gender performance also obligated her to demur, defer, and translate the
needs and wants of those around her, her translation also allowed her to unite ideas in ways that
saw through to what computing could and would do for the world. She exemplifies the power of
the Humanities and Sciences combined. Lovelace thus offers an interdisciplinary and
intersectional example for women in engineering.

The above history should be integrated into curricula in science and engineering undergraduate
classrooms in order to continue the change in origin narratives that Suw-Charman sought to
pioneer with Ada Lovelace Day. To that end, we suggest the following lesson plan consisting of
a one-hour video and 30 minute pre-discussion and 50 minute post-discussion to be used in
undergraduate classrooms (such as Humanities and Technology courses or Introductory
Computer Science courses) or outreach activities, such as Women in Science and Engineering
events.
1. (30 minutes) Before watching the documentary, prompt students to write freely for 10
minutes about everything they know about Britain in the 1800s and the history of
computer science.
a. Ask students to share highlights of what they thought about and then sketch some
facts to augment or correct students’ impressions about the century and/or the
history of computer science. See BBC’s British History timeline for resources on
surveying this broad subject—the purpose here is to help students contextualize
Ada Lovelace in time [34]. Do not spend more than 15 minutes orienting students
regarding historical events as this subject could take up endless time.
2. (1 hour) Have students watch (as homework or during a dedicated session) the BBC’s
2015 documentary, “Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing” (59 minutes) [35-
36].
a. During the documentary, have students take notes on what they find strange /
interesting / revealing about Ada Lovelace and her contributions to the history of
computer science.
3. (50 minutes) During the next class session, or immediately after screening the
documentary if there is time during an outreach activity, follow up with a discussion
delving into the history of Ada Lovelace by using the following questions to scaffold
responses. When necessary if discussion lags, ask students to either think-pair-share by
sharing their ideas with a partner near them for 2-5 minutes before sharing with the larger
class/group or ask students to write their thoughts freely for a 2-5 minutes and then share
in conversation with the larger class/group.
a. How was Ada Lovelace able to contribute to what would become computer
science in 1843? What challenges did she encounter? How did she deal with these
challenges?
b. Does knowing about Ada Lovelace change your impressions of the history of
computer science and women’s roles in it?
c. Do you recognize any similarities between the struggles Ada had to confront in
order to succeed and the struggles that women today might have to confront to
succeed in computer science? What are the similarities and differences? Can Ada
Lovelace’s example help us imagine ways that we can lower barriers for women
in science today? Why or why not? How so?

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The above activity is geared toward highlighting the knowledge that students already bring to the
subject, introducing new ideas, and then reframing prior knowledge through those new ideas.
Such a discussion will move in many different ways based on the many diverse experiences
students bring to the subject, but the goal is for the example of Ada Lovelace to help students
think intersectionally about the challenges of changing science and engineering culture to be
more accommodating and welcoming of feminine perspectives.

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References

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