What we are teaching in Introduction to Computer Graphics

Abstract

Computer Graphics is a very active field, with new knowledge being published every day at a high rate. There is, therefore, some pressure to regularly review our teaching contents and adjust accordingly. Among the courses on a standard curriculum, the introductory computer graphics course is very often the door for students into the exciting area of computer graphics. It is also the opportunity to attract and engage the best talent for the field. In this paper, we address the question of what we are teaching in the introductory computer graphics course as a community. Our main motivation was to find out how our peers are teaching this first course and use this knowledge to ease the redesign of our introductory course. We have surveyed 20 introductory computer graphics undergraduate courses from higher level educational institutions from around the world. Our source of information was purely online available resources, such as the weekly list of topics, usually provided by the professors themselves. We gathered and processed this data using a bottom-up approach. The final top level list of subjects and percentages for the introductory computer graphics courses is as follows: Rendering (75%), Modeling (14%), Animation (7%), Fundamentals (3%), and Visualization (1%). Although there is a common body of knowledge and proposed standards for an introductory course in computer graphics, we also noticed considerable variation among institutions. We believe this survey will be helpful for institutions considering designing a new introductory course from scratch or redesigning an existing one.