Moti Ben-Ari interview: Overview

Moti Ben-Ari

On a separate page: Selected quotes from this interview


Brief background

Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari is a professor of computer science education at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is very active in the field, having published numerous computer science textbooks, developed software tools for teaching CS, and written many influential papers in CS education. His primary research focus has been related to how students learn theoretical concepts in computer science, such as concurrency and mathematical logic. He and his students have collaborated with the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu (formerly University of Joensuu) to develop the Jeliot program animation system for teaching elementary computer science and programming.

At the time of this interview, Dr. Ben-Ari was an Associate Professor in the Department of Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. He received the 2004 ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education with the citation “Textbook author, mentor and pedagogical researcher at both the university and pre-college levels, in concurrency, formal methods, and programming languages.”

Interview materials

This section includes the audio and transcript of the interview with Moti Ben-Ari, conducted on July 1, 2008 in Madrid, Spain by Elizabeth Adams.

Audio of interview [44 minutes]

PDF of interview transcript
[15 pages, 638 transcribed lines of text]

Other information about Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari

Video clip: Value of a broad education, with an example from an aeronautics project

  • About 1 minute 41 seconds; PDF transcript of video clip is located further down under the video
  • This video clip is also available on CEOHP’s YouTube channel