History of Computer Science Education

Dr. Nell B. Dale

Dr. Nell B. Dale was one of the first women to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the early 1970s. She graduated from the University of Texas Department of Computer Sciences and remained on the faculty until her retirement from full-time teaching in 2000. She was originator and director of the Women in Science Program in the early '80s and has been a mentor to students and colleagues throughout her career.

Her research interests have focused on computer science education as an academic discipline. She co-chaired five dissertations in the area and was content representative on five additional dissertations in CS Education. She wrote the Research in Computing Education Column in the SIGCSE Bulletin from 1998 to 2002.

Dr. Dale was very active in SIGCSE, the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education. She served on the Board, as Chair, and as conference chair for two SIGCSE Technical Symposia. She was active in the advanced placement exams in computing from the beginning, serving as reader, table leader, and question leader.

During her career she has authored or co-authored 18 textbooks, many in multiple editions. They have focused on problem solving, programming, and data structures using Pascal, C++, and Java as the vehicles for implementation.

Dr. Dale has received the prestigious SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education and was the first woman to receive the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)'s prestigious Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. She has won two Hamilton Awards for the best textbook published at UT in a given year. She has received the ABACUS Award from Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Honor Society for the Computing Sciences and was elected a Fellow of the ACM. She received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from Sewanee, The University of the South. In 2013, she received the Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the IEEE, again the first woman to do so.