Using History To Teach Computer Science and Related Disciplines

This volume on using history to improve computing education came out of conversations that the first author had in 2000 with Andrew Bernat, the current executive director of the Computing Research Association who was then a program officer at the National Science Foundation, on leave from the University of Texas at El Paso. Andy and I had wide-ranging talks about various means for improving computer science education. He encouraged me to submit a proposal to NSF on using history to improve undergraduate computing education and talked with me on several occasions as I was preparing the proposal. Since Andy and I previously had written a report together, he was not permitted, under conflict-of-interest rules, to be the program officer for this proposal. The proposal was turned over to Harriet Taylor, who helped me through the proposal process. NSF awarded grant number DUE-0111938 to support this activity. The grant was used to hold two workshops: the first at Amherst College August 6-7, 2001, and the second at the University of Minnesota April 26-28, 2002.1 Each was attended by about forty people, primarily undergraduate teachers of computer science. The original plan for disseminating the results was to make a few presentations at meetings such as the annual ACM SIGCSE conference or the annual Frontiers in Education conference. The organizing committee’s frugality meant that attendees of the first workshop suffered through 100-degree weather in dorm rooms with no air conditioning, and attendees of the second meeting had to trek almost a mile through snowstorms to the meeting space. However, this frugality also meant that we had funds left over to collect and edit papers, publish them, and post them on a website where they could receive much wider dissemination than any workshop talk would achieve. In meetings held in Chicago in April 2004 and in Needham, Mass. in May 2004, the contributors to this volume met to critique one another’s papers. The contributors include most of those who spoke at one or both of the workshops, plus a few additional historians and computer scientists who were invited to submit papers. Professor Atsushi Akera of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who was one of the workshop speakers, kindly offered to take principal responsibility for editing the publication. Jean Smith of the CRA staff has undertaken her usual exemplary work as the copyeditor for the volume, under a very tight set of deadlines.