How to explain the history of programming to non-programmers?

Question

Sorry if this question is not appropriate for this stack exchange site, I've never used this one before.

I am doing my senior project on computer programming. I'm going to be presenting the project to classmates, teachers and (most importantly) judges, who haven't the slightest clue what programming is.

My question is somewhat broad, but how should I make my project to be about programming but still be simple enough for the judges to understand? Here are some things I considered:

1. The project will focus on the history of programming, what it has accomplished, how it is used today, etc. and I will show pictures of code and say "This is what code looks like". So the presentation would be simple, easy, and average.

2. Try to explain a little bit of code, perhaps show a loop in action or something like that, and try to make the audience think a bit rather than just watch someone present some stuff they consider to be boring. But then again, I don't want to make them feel stupid or anything.

Answer 1

If your presentation is about the history of programming I would focus on how a computer only understands binary, and that binary is essentially impossible for a human to understand so programming languages were created. From there I would show the same sample program in several languages to show the evolution to modern languages, something simple but not a bit more than hello world. This would cover concepts like compiling, and how language A can be used to create language B. Talking about how memory constraints factored into design would also be good.

Explaining what a loop does or steeping through code explaining why its done this way isn't as related programming, because it would be an explanation of instruction logic that has existed longer than just electronic computers (finite state machines, mechanical computers). While this is a concept that is fundamental to programming, it explains what programming is rather than what has been accomplished through programming/how its used today.