Sometimes it is not easy to teach CS. The language and terminology we use is one of the important factors of that. To approach this problem domain I'd like to know more about your experiences in class with misunderstandings, confusions and misconceptions or misusage of terms during lessons related to computer science / informatics.
Back when I was teaching C/C++, there was always head shaking when I tried to explain the difference between a character pointer that had a value of NULL and a character pointer that pointed to a string of size 0 (ie. ""). a pointer to the Null string v a pointer to Null.
One that I find gets students pretty bad is when you describe things formally as students think formal thinking is always about equations and inequalities when most proofs have words to guide the reader. This usually first comes up when we formally go through the definition of Big-Oh. They usually just proceed to pick c and n_0 then just plug in n_0 into the inequality (which is not what you are suppose to do, and is a common pitfall).
Now to the point, I actually had to have the discussion about using words to describe what you are trying to show. For example, just writing down x
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