Exploring the role of visualization and engagement in computer science education
Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Panel 4: What Should We Teach in a Scientific Visualization Class?
VIS '04 Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '04
ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics - Learning through computer-generated visualization
Revisiting the Need for Formal Education in Visualization
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data, however, in today's society you need more than a simple bar chart to convey the data message. Second Life (SL) offers so many benefits, from remote viewing of data to free software download. No longer does a person have to be in the same room or on a particular computer to view data visualizations. Many educators believe in order to teach visualization, students must have already taken a graphics course. We believe using SL dramatically changes this concept. We discuss how using SL allowed two students to conduct research in visualization without prior graphics experience. These research projects proved that SL could be used in the future to teach an undergraduate visualization course. By having the instructor or research students create predefined communication and navigation objects, the course participants could embed these predefined objects within their visualization and modify some variables to make it easily work with their 3D visualization model. We concluded that an "Introduction to Visualization" course using SL was possible based on the SL visualization research conducted over the past year and restores makes this a promising elective without having graphics as a prerequisite.