Right. Zero based indexing makes zero sense, unless you explain the underlying technical reason, that it’s an offset relative to a memory pointer (spend a week teaching pointers first!).

It makes sense in certain context (and in languages like C that have a low-level mental model). For scientific computing at a higher level of abstraction where the mental model of a multidimensional array is a tensor, and not a memory offset location, zero-based indices really get in the way