About ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award

Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his pioneering textbooks, software tools and research on learning concurrent programming, program visualization, logic, and programming languages, spanning four decades and aimed at both novices and advanced students in several subfields of computing.

Ben-Ari, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has authored 15 well-known and widely-used textbooks on topics including concurrent and distributed programming, programming languages, model checking, and mathematical logic. Many of these books are the definitive textbooks in their respective areas, and several have been translated into many languages.

In addition to his textbooks, Ben-Ari has developed several open source software tools for teaching computer science. The tools he developed and co-developed for teaching various subject areas include: for distributed and concurrent programming (DAJ, Jbaci); for model checking (JSpin and EriGone); for program visualization (the Jeliot animation tool); and for SAT solving (LearnSAT).

Ben-Ari has also been a leader in the area of computer science education theory, having written seminal research papers on constructivism and situated learning. Demonstrating his broad range of interests, he recently co-authored (with Francesco Mondada) Elements of Robotics, an open source textbook for high school students. Ben-Ari’s work has helped to educate and inspire generations of students in computer science.