Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada Lovelace Day has begun!

Do you remember which women have influenced you over the years?

Perhaps your maths teacher, one of your university lecturers, or a colleague?
This Ada Lovelace Day on October 7, share your story about a woman — whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician — who has inspired you to become who you are today. Write a blog post, record a podcast, film a video, draw a comic, or pick any other way to talk about the women who have been guiding lights in your life. Give your heroine the credit she deserves!

Ada Lovelace Day- Carmen Sandiego

Ada Lovelace day is about celebrating women in science and technology, and as is my want, I'm going to talk about a woman who is literally IN technology.

This woman in technology was and is an aspirational character who influenced a generation (and certainly me) to show that girls and woman can be anything, even international supervillains. Designed to teach geography, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was released in 1985, and released a dozen successful games between then and 2001. The games also spawned a game show on PBS, several movies, a few animated serieses, a smattering of books and even an album from the game show by the band Rockapella.


Carmen Isabella Sandiego is a Hispanic, international thief with a lot of ambition and an absurd degree of technical acumen. Carmen Sandiego is a classic outlaw, a modern day femme fatale who not only knew how to run an international organized crime syndicate but was well versed in the world's treasures, coming up with countless schemes that somehow involved stealing the Taj Mahal, Ankgor Wat or Big Ben. Carmen Sandiego not only found a new way to logistically move these artifacts and monuments in every mission but she was particularly hard to catch.

She was always one step ahead of the ACME Detective Agency, whose chief was also at times a woman. As a little girl I spent hours learning geography while chasing Ms. Sandiego across space and time and I remember where Dar es Salaam is today in no small part because I played these games. Utilizing the video game format to teach with humor really resonated with this first generation of kids who had access to personal computers. Carmen Sandiego helped kids learn about the world they live in, historically, physically and even kept kids listening and reading as they learned about plants, animals and art. Something that I think needs to be mentioned is that these games were popular with girls AND boys, they were educational and fun and no one really cared that Carmen Sandiego was a girl, she was awesome.



... so was her theme song.

Ada Lovelace Day

So, today is celebrating Ada Lovelace through the wonders of blogging check out FindingAda.com for details.

Basically, the point is to talk about a woman in technology. Girls are often shown the same role models over and over, but Ada Lovelace, possibly the world's first computer programmer, is one that many girls don't hear about until they log in to cracked.com or some other random fact humor site as adults. I'll throw my mother into the mix, as many young girls have mothers in technology, and witnessing my own mother's work certainly affected my opinion of women in sciences and technology far more than something I saw on television.

Dr. Elizabeth K. Burns - Urban Geographer

Dr. Burns ran a lab called the Center for Advanced Transportation Systems Research in the 1990s, she used Global Information Systems (GIS) at a time when she often had to explain what that, and what Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were to her colleagues. She had been studying the growth of cities and sociological trends and how they can be modeled using computer systems since the 1970s, and achieved the most national attention for her work on the differences between the transportation usage patterns of men and women, and on improving traffic congestion in cities. That said, she also did work with counties in Arizona trying to figure out where their water systems actually were, and a significant amount of mapping in for the city of Phoenix when they wanted to secure their own systems.

It's always amazed me that things as strait-forward as civic water systems weren't as thoroughly documented as I assumed, growing up in a computerized world. Or, the ramifications of school bus routes on kids bicycling to school. She was working in computing and applying it to Urban Geography.

She is currently retired and working on a mass market novel about her studies and experiences.

I think what my mother has accomplished is amazing, and blew my mind completely for a good 16 years of my life ("my mom is a professor, she runs a lab with a bunch of computers"- says 6-12 year old me). Her accomplishments actually affect the choices that civic planners make, and the development of cities in the future (we can hope).

It is important to remember when searching out women in technology as role models to note that for many girls, the female role model that they see working in technology is not famous, that woman is also coming home every day and tucking them into bed.

I'm definitely going to be looking at the blogs today to see which women in technology other bloggers picked, because, it seems to me it's an early time to be picking out the heroines of the Information Age. It's a huge world out there and literally every field is being impacted by people implimenting and making use of new technology that has ramified into every facet of society.

That said, I'd love to see a movie about Ada Lovelace and Babbage's early computer, and I can't wait to read my mom's book.