A Creative First Assignment in the Modern Graphics Pipeline

Abstract

This paper describes a first assignment in an Introduction to Computer Graphics course taken by undergraduate students at a liberal arts college. The assignment marries the technical challenges found at the lowest level of the modern graphics pipeline with the artistic concerns of reproducing a piece of art. To do so, students extend provided code in WebGL, which includes GLSL shaders and no additional libraries, to reproduce a work of art of their own choosing. This task requires the students to involve themselves simultaneously in the most technical and most artistic aspects of computer graphics. Such an inter-disciplinary approach helps to reach a more diverse audience of computer graphics learners.