Teaching 3D Computer Animation to Non-programming Experts

Abstract

This paper describes a Computer Animation course aimed at novice Computer Science and Engineering students with minimal programming skills. We observe that students enrolled in Computer Graphics (and related) undergraduate degrees usually face a Computer Animation subject early in their programs, sometimes even before they develop strong software development and programming skills. This causes that assignments and tasks where students should focus on the Computer Animation concepts, end up in frustration and massive efforts to just get over-complicated developing frameworks running. Instead, we propose a Computer Animation course based on small MATLAB tasks that covers a large range of topics and it is adapted to students with minimal programming skills. For each topic, we provide a brief theoretical summary and links to fundamental literature, as well as a set of hands-on tasks with the necessary source code to get started. A user study shows that students who took this course were able to better focus on the fundamental concepts of the subject, circumventing the need to learn advanced programming skills. Course material is available on a public GitHub repository, and solutions are provided upon request from course tutors.