Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Teaching computer graphics without raster-level algorithms
Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Teaching graphics with the openGL shading language
Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
τεΧνη: trial phase for the new curriculum
Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
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Most recent graphics courses are what we would call top-down courses. Courses that focus on using graphical packages to implement and teach graphics. The course discussed in this paper takes the opposite approach. We use a bottom-up approach to teach the basic concepts of graphics. In this class graphics is used as a learning tool, to delve into the underlying data structures and concepts that are needed to create photo-realistic images. The students build a program to create images from scratch using the C programming languages. While there have been other graphics courses to take a bottom-up approach, this paper builds the graphical projects using only the C programming language, no graphics APIs are used in the class. During the course of the semester object-oriented concepts and differences between object-oriented languages and procedural languages are highlighted and discussed in detail. The students not only learn the basic concepts of graphics, but become familiar with the C programming language (students at our university begin programming with Java). The course could be easily tailored for several different classes in a typical CS curriculum, from a beginning programming course, to a programming languages course. At the conclusion of the course a student survey was also conducted to gather student feedback about the course.