A Programmable Tutor for OpenGL Transformations

Abstract

Computer Graphics is a growing field that is becoming more and more present in Computer Science studies at University level. This has lead to the creation of a large number of support materials, such as tutorials, white papers, and teaching books. Geometric transforms is commonly one of the topics that all Computer Graphics courses must deal with, and, traditionally, is one of the issues that students find difficult to master. Some of the problems come from the difficulty of using a blackboard to represent 3D objects, and it is therefore very convenient to have tutorial applications that are able to help through the learning process. In light of this, we have built a geometric transformation tutor that is intended to improve student understanding of the operations that are carried out on the OpenGL transformation matrices, and the results in terms of visualization. The application achieves a nice balance between the flexibility provided by a script language and the easiness of use. A key benefit of the application is the possibility of writing interactive tutorials demonstrating topics such as camera and object animation.