Dr Richard O'Keefe, Department of Computer Science

Title: Why do we make it all so difficult?

Bob Doran at the University of Auckland noticed that

"our textbooks and notes present code to beginning students that seems to be much more difficult to understand than is necessary."

This talk is a presentation of his complaint and his ideas. For now I'll leave you with one example, from a popular CS1 Java textbook. When the authors present binary search, the ONLY version shown has a lot of graphics code intermingled with it, and uses the name "element" for an index (not an element).