Educator, computer pioneer.
Born at Kamsack, Saskatchewan in 1928, daughter of Belgian immigrants Rose Cleutinx and Raymond DeVylder, she finished high school at Kamsack then moved to Winnipeg to further her education. On 17 June 1950, she married accountant Robert Lorne McRitchie (1922-2006) at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church and they had a son and a daughter.
In 1960, she began a 30-year teaching career as a part-time substitute. Three years later, she took a full-time position as a business education teacher at Miles Macdonell Collegiate, rising to the position of Department Head. She moved to Kildonan East Collegiate in 1971 and again headed the business education department, where she established one of Manitoba's first computer science courses at the secondary level. In the mid-1970s, she introduced microcomputers to the high school curriculum. She wrote two textbooks on computer science education, one of which was Programming in BASIC: A Complete Course (1982), that became standards in North America and were translated into Spanish. During this time, she took part-time classes at the University of Manitoba, culminating in a BSc degree in Computer Science (1980). She retired in 1989.
She died at Winnipeg on 20 February 2011.
Death registration [Raymond DeVylder], British Columbia Vital Statistics.
“Wedding is solemnized Saturday noon,” Winnipeg Tribune, 20 June 1950, page 14.
Obituary [Robert Lorne McRitchie], Winnipeg Free Press, 10 September 2006.
Obituary, Winnipeg Free Press, 11 April 2011.
This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 1 December 2024
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