Overview of the Discipline of Computer Science - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 30

Activity 4: History of Computational Machines
This activity focuses on the first computers. The students are asked to work
in teams and to look for old computation machines. After the results of this
searching process is briefly summarized in the class, each group explores
one model/machine, addressing how it worked, how it fitted into the specific
historical point of the development of computer science, and the computer
scientist(s) that was/were involved it and contributed to its development. This
task can be connected naturally to the topic of computer scientists (presented
next). In addition, it can lead to a discussion about the parallel, yet inter-
twined, developments of the technological facet of computer science and its
conceptual facet, and the interactions between the two, when one facet pre-
cedes the other and pushes the development of both facets.

3.4 Computer Scientists

The topic of computer scientists is a central part of the history of computer science
that computer science teachers should be familiar with. Their familiarity with the
topic may enable them first, to present to their future pupils some computer science
topics more vividly by connecting them to peoples' stories, and second, to improve
their own understanding of the development of computer science.
We suggest two options how to teach this topic. Some educators prefer to present
computer scientists with relation to a specific computer science topic; others prefer
to dedicate a lesson to the people who shaped the discipline in order to highlight
its human aspect. In any case, it is recommended to let the students be aware of the
fact that they are familiar with several computer scientists from their computer sci-
ence studies so far. For example, they probably have heard about Edsger Dijkstra
(from their studies of graph algorithms) and about Alan Turing (when learning Tur-
ing Machine in the Computability course or the Turing test as part of the Artificial
Inelegance course).
In order to increase the students' awareness to this aspect of the history of com-
puter science, it is recommended first, to discuss in the MTCS course the two al-
ternatives for teaching this topic and second, to dedicate one lesson of the MTCS
course for students' short presentations (15 min each) on one computer scientist.
One source to look for a computer scientist is the list of the Turing Award recipi-
ents. The award is named after Alan Turing, who has already been mentioned sev-
eral times in this chapter. He was a British mathematician and one of the computer
science pioneers. The A. M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for
Computing Machinery to “an individual selected for contributions of a technical
nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting
and major technical importance to the computer field.” 6 Needless to say that this
list does not exhaust the list of computer scientists, and other computer scientists as
well contributed significantly to the field.