After the publication of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) report “History in the Computing Curriculum” in 1998, the history of computing has been settling in the college and university computing sciences curricula. In this eye-opening paper, the authors are advocating for a similar movement to younger and wider masses--high school students.

In contrasting education across several countries, the authors provide a framework for the introduction of the history of informatics across the secondary education curricula. They adopt the widely used term across Europe, informatics, to denote reference to the discipline of the use and manipulation of information that surpasses computers as a means to an end. The framework is didactically appropriate for the targeted audience, and includes several steps: building prior knowledge, connecting prior knowledge to historical facts, and relating historical topics to current issues in informatics, regardless of whether this is executed in the informatics courses that many secondary European curricula contain as a mandatory curricular component, or in the context of other courses.

As such, this paper is a powerful tool in the teacher’s toolkit for building knowledge based on critical thinking, exposure to past successes, and the ability to learn from past failures in order to not repeat them.