Congress Declares Week of Dec 7 Computer Science Education Week

The US House of Representatives has passed House Resolution 558 in order to

“inform students, teachers, parents, and the general public about the crucial role that computer science plays in transforming our society and how computer science enables innovation in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines and creates economic opportunities”

In this spirit, the House declared the week of Dec 7th to be National Computer Science Education week. For more information, see this press release from the Association for Computing Machinery.

The week of Dec 7th was chosen in honor of Grace Hopper’s birthday on Dec 9th. Hopper was one of the first women in computer science and was part of the team that developed UNIVAC I, one of the first commercially available computers. Her work with human-readable programming languages and programming language standardization continues to be influential to this day.