How I Teach Modern C++ One Pixel at a Time

The C++ language has a reputation of being a very powerful, fast, and expressive, but it also has a reputation of being a difficult to learn language for beginners. My opinion though, is that we can always be improving our teaching materials for beginners--that's why I teach the C++ programming language one pixel at a time. What does a pixel have to do with the language? It's not so much the graphics (though that is a motivating domain to use the C++ language), but in the ability for beginning programmers to visualize and see what they are programming. In this talk I reflect on how to not just teach C++, but how to motivate, inspire, and get beginners to build cool graphical projects while learning the Modern C++ language.

Mike Shah

I am currently an Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. My primary teaching interests are in computer systems and computer graphics. My research interests are related to performance engineering (dynamic analysis) and software visualization.

Along with teaching and research work, I have juggled occasional consulting work as a 3D Senior Graphics Engineer.