Rebel Girls Ada Lovelace Cracks the Code

Building on the success of the hugely popular Goodnight stories for Rebel Girls with its brief illustrated biographies of significant women, these two chapter books are the first of a new series from the Rebel Girls franchise with each focusing on a particular individual. With this format there is the opportunity to give a fuller account of their development and the experiences which shaped them to success and achievement in different fields.

Ada Lovelace Cracks the Code describes Ada Lovelace’s life story and how, despite childhood illness and her early death she became a key figure in the development of computer programming. Readers learn about Ada’s fascination with Science and Maths as a young child and the individuals who helped shape her development including her mother, inspirational tutors and mentors. Her collaboration with the inventor Charles Babbage triggered her interest in creating algorithms to instruct machines. However, her achievements were largely hidden in her lifetime due to the prevalent view that women did not have the mental capacity to comprehend mathematical ideas let alone create them.

Written in a lively style and illustrated throughout this book provides an accessible, attractive and highly readable insight into Ada’s life. Her enthusiasm, personal difficulties and achievements are clearly set in the context of nineteenth century attitudes to women and their capacities. The back of the book includes activities introducing the idea of coding produced by Wogrammer who collaborated with Rebel Girls.