A nontraditional computer graphics course for computer science students

Abstract

The recent theoretical and technological advancement in computer graphics has brought not only exciting changes to the computing field but also new challenges to computer science educators. One of the challenges is effective teaching of computer graphics to computer science students. Several speakers at the SIGGRAPH "91 educators' program addressed various aspects of this theme (Owen, 1991; Schweitzer, 1991; Clevenger, 1991). A SIGGRAPH '92 panel consisting of representatives from academia and industry exchanged ideas and viewpoints on issues ranging from syllabus to the role of graphics in a computer science curriculum. I had the pleasure of being a member of that panel and this paper is a further elaboration of my brief statement in the conference proceedings (Schaller, 1992, 1993).The Department of Computer Science at Queens College offers computer graphics as an elective at the senior level for undergraduate students. The department also offers computer graphics at the graduate level. Since the majority of our graduate students have had no prior training in computer graphics, the two courses do not constitute a one-year sequence and the following considerations are applicable to both cases.The traditional way of teaching computer graphics to computer science students places an emphasis on vector graphics. After some general introduction, discussion typically proceeds to graphical primitives and their attributes, then windowing and geometric transformations, followed by segments and interactive techniques, leading to the use of a standard library such as GKS. Additional 3-D topics may include representation, transformation, projection and hidden surface removal algorithms. Color, and especially shading models, are not discussed until near the end of the semester.While this traditional approach has made invaluable contributions to computer graphics education, it needs to be improved in order to keep up with the rapid growth of the field over the last several years. In the next section, I present a nontraditional syllabus along with a detailed explanation. Sample assignments are in section 3. A comparison of the two syllabi and concluding remarks are in section 4.The computer graphics course described in this paper is quite similar to the course taught by Scott Owen (Owen, 1994).