St Mary's Junior School pupils follow in the pioneering footsteps of women in Computer Science

On Wednesday 9 October, all of our Year 6 girls visited the 'Centre For Computing History' here in Cambridge to participate in the museum’s annual ‘Women in Computing Festival’.  

During the visit they participated in a series of practical activities including:

• Learning how to program 40-year-old BBC Micro computers using the text-based BBC Basic coding language.
• Discussing the evolution of computers and their uses throughout history.
• Playing ‘noughts and crosses’ against an original Elliott 903 computer from 1967!
• Learning about local computer scientist, Sophie Wilson, and the work she and her team undertook in Cambridge to develop the microchip that forms the brain of many of the devices that we use today.
• Exploring the development of computer games by gaining hands-on experience with a variety of historic computers and their original software.
• Working with Mentors from ARM to learn about a variety of jobs in tech-related industries.

The staff at the centre were extremely impressed with the girls, not only in terms of their Computer Science skills, but also with their interest in the development of computing and the historical figures who pioneered it, and their intelligent questions and observations throughout the visit.

All of the girls had a thoroughly enjoyable experience and now have a much greater understanding of the parts that they may be able to play in the next phase of developments within the computing and technology industries, by following in the footsteps of the pioneering women who have already been so instrumental in this field.

Photographs from the visit