Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day

I can’t really figure out why, but the second Tuesday in October is celebrated annually as Ada Lovelace Day, a day to recognize the accomplishments of women in STEM and encourage women and girls to explore STEM careers. (It’s definitely a worthy day I just don’t know why it is this particular day. She was born Dec. 10, 1815 and died Nov. 27, 1852, so the day had no clear connection to her.)

It’s a great day to celebrate the legacy of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron (though he was not involved in her life and her education was directed by her mother) who was a pioneer in early computing. She worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computer that was never built. She recognized that the computer could be used as more than just a calculator, and she wrote the first algorithm for a computer to follow, making her the world’s first computer programmer.

Science Sparks has a good printable fact file on her that you can use to get started learning about her and her accomplishments. Kids Konnect has fact sheets and printables you can use in the classroom or at home to talk about her life and work.

Get a free set of printable punch card numbers to use for number recognition with an early-computing twist from Playground Parkbench.

Teach Starter has a basic coding activity using pattern recognition that little kids can do. Any activity involving coding without a computer would be a great thing to do to celebrate this day. Or use scratch to build a poetry generator, with this project from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Check out a BrainPop video on Ada Lovelace below.

If you need more resources, there are tons of printables related to Ada Lovelace on Teachers Pay Teachers, including reading passages, coding projects and other STEM activities and more.

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Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

Have you read?

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