DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR REVIEW AND COURSE USE
Steve Cunningham
California State University Stanislaus
The materials at this site are designed to support a new kind of introductory computer graphics course. This course is intended to be a service course for science, mathematics, and engineering students as well as a sound introduction to computer graphics for computer science students. A full set of course notes has been developed to support this approach and is available online (PDF format, approximately 3 MB as of 25 September 2000), and I am glad to acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Michael J. Bailey to these notes. The notes were frozen in late September 2000 and will be used for my course in the fall, 2000 at CSU Stanislaus; a revised set will be released at the end of the year. In addition to a graphics programming focus, the notes include some materials that are novel in an introductory course and I hope you will find these of interest. The notes include some evaluation pages for both instructors and students, and if you download the notes for your own course use or simply for your information, I would greatly appreciate your sending me your comments.
The new approach to the course is built upon a current API and gives students an introduction to the concepts of interactive computer graphics while discussing rendering algorithms at only a conceptual level. Currently the API is OpenGL. This approach is described in several articles (see below) and supports a curriculum in which there will be a second graphics course that provides the traditional algorithms and techniques to those computer science students who want to go on to become graphics professionals. There are also an important role for this course in a Computational Science program. Some papers and presentations (all in PDF format) that describe this approach to the course are:
For the graphics course in Computer Science:
Paper in Computers & GraphicsFor the graphics course in a Computational Science area:
San Diego State University presentation slidesAn important aspect of the direction that will be taken in this course approach is the use of the scene graph, as defined in Java3D and VRML 2, as the basis for both simple and heirarchical modeling. This approach is included briefly in the course notes but will be expanded considerably later in this year; it was written up in a paper that has been submitted and that you can get here:
Scene Graph PaperA current set of course materials for this course is also online, and you are welcome to review these materials or use them as you like in your own courses; I would appreciate any comments here as well. The materials for the current course at CSU Stanislaus are available online and will be developed as the course progresses, and you are welcome to look at those materials.
In order to fill the service course role, the course should
include project sequences that support students’ subject matter in their
home disciplines, and the materials here are intended to provide examples
of such projects. As I note in the individual subject areas, the
draft materials at this site are posted for review only. These materials
are being developed subject-by-subject, and links will be activated below
when drafts are available in each subject. I look forward to hearing about
ways to improve the materials and hope you will send me any comments you
may have on the projects or the course materials at rsc@cs.csustan.edu
Subject areas:
Chemistry
Mathematics
Last updated October 15, 2000