EG 2019 - Education Papers
Permanent URI for this collection
Educate to Visualize
Integrating Visualization Literacy into Computer Graphics Education Using the Example of
Dear Data
] [
]
Andrey Krekhov, Michael Michalski, and Jens Krüger
EduClust - A Visualization Application for Teaching Clustering Algorithms
Johannes Fuchs, Petra Isenberg, Anastasia Bezerianos, Matthias Miller, and Daniel Keim
Mapping Creative Coding Courses: Toward Bespoke Programming Curricula in Graphic Design
Education
Stig Møller Hansen
Tool up for CG Education
A Parser-based Tool to Assist Instructors in Grading Computer Graphics Assignments
Carlos Andujar, Cristina Raluca Vijulie, and Alvar Vinacua
How to Write a Visualization Survey Paper: A Starting Point
Liam McNabb and Robert S. Laramee
Assessing Graphic Designers' Learning Style Profile to Improve Creative Coding Courses
Stig Møller Hansen
Foster Student 3D Creativity
Do contests improve students skills in Computer Graphics? The case of API8
Jean-Pascal Palus, Farès Belhadj, and Jean-Jacques Bourdin
A Breadth-First Introduction to VFX: A Holistic Approach for Teaching the Visual Effects
Production Pipeline
Adam Redford, Melania Fodritto, and Eike Falk Anderson
Vegetable Matter Decay: An Exceptional Student 'Innovations' Project
Eike Falk Anderson, Bianca Cirdei, and Valery Adzhiev
Teaching Computer Graphics Based on a Commercial Product
Gregory Smith and Kelvin Sung
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Item Integrating Visualization Literacy into Computer Graphics Education Using the Example of Dear Data(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Krekhov, Andrey; Michalski, Michael; Krüger, Jens; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThe amount of visual communication we are facing is rapidly increasing, and skills to process, understand, and generate visual representations are in high demand. Especially students focusing on computer graphics and visualization can benefit from a more diverse education on visual literacy, as they often have to work on graphical representations for broad masses after their graduation. Our proposed teaching approach incorporates basic design thinking principles into traditional visualization and graphics education. Our course was inspired by the book Dear Data that was the subject of a lively discussion at the closing capstone of IEEE VIS 2017. The paper outlines our 12-week teaching experiment and summarizes the results extracted from accompanying questionnaires and interviews. In particular, we provide insights into the creation process and pain points of visualization novices, discuss the observed interplay between visualization tasks and design thinking, and finally draw design implications for visual literacy education in general.Item Mapping Creative Coding Courses: Toward Bespoke Programming Curricula in Graphic Design Education(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Hansen, Stig Møller; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThis paper presents a study of 30 syllabi gathered from introductory Creative Coding programming courses. A selection of the results concerning the courses' structure and content is presented and discussed. The majority of the analyzed courses exhibited evidence of being planned to adapt and submit graphic design topics to programming paradigms. Also, topics and algorithms of particular value to graphic design as a spatial practice were absent in many courses. Finally, most courses did not investigate visual output that is achievable only through computation. The present study argues that educators must adapt their Creative Coding syllabi and teaching materials to make programming meet the needs of graphic designers rather than the other way around. The findings in this paper provide a point of departure for a critical discussion among educators who wish to integrate programming in graphic design education.Item EduClust - A Visualization Application for Teaching Clustering Algorithms(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Fuchs, Johannes; Isenberg, Petra; Bezerianos, Anastasia; Miller, Matthias; Keim, Daniel; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricWe present EduClust, a visualization application for teaching clustering algorithms. EduClust is an online application that combines visualizations, interactions, and animations to facilitate the understanding and teaching of clustering steps, parameters, and procedures. Traditional classroom settings aim for cognitive processes like remembering and understanding. We designed EduClust for expanded educational objectives like applying and evaluating. Educators can use the tool in class to show the effect of different clustering parameters on various datasets while animating through each algorithm's steps, but also use the tool to prepare traditional teaching material quickly by exporting animations and images. Students, on the other hand, benefit from the ability to compare and contrast the influence of clustering parameters on different datasets, while seeing technical details such as pseudocode and step-by-step explanations.Item A Parser-based Tool to Assist Instructors in Grading Computer Graphics Assignments(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Andujar, Carlos; Raluca Vijulie, Cristina; Vinacua, Alvar; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricAlthough online e-learning environments are increasingly used in university courses, manual assessment still dominates the way students are graded. Interactive judges providing a pass/fail verdict based on test sets are valuable tools both for learning and assessment, but still rely on human review of the code for output-independent issues such as readability and efficiency. In this paper we present a tool to assist instructors in grading programming exercises in Computer Graphics (CG) courses. In contrast to other grading solutions, assessment is based both on checking the output against test sets, and through a set of instructor-defined rubrics based on syntax analysis of the source code. Our current prototype runs in Python and supports the assessment of shaders written in GLSL language. We tested the tool in a CG course involving more than one hundred Computer Science students per year. Our first experiments show the tool can be useful to support both self-assessment and grading, as well as detecting grading mistakes through anomaly detection techniques based on features extracted from the syntax analysis.Item Assessing Graphic Designers' Learning Style Profile to Improve Creative Coding Courses(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Hansen, Stig Møller; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThis study aimed at assessing graphic design students' preferences for learning to help design school educators teaching Creative Coding programming courses adapt their teaching style to account for the way their students learn. The Felder- Soloman Index of Learning Styles (ILS©) was administered to 77 bachelor-level graphic design students. Compared to students in technical fields, the graphic design students differed by being considerably more intuitive, with an increased preference for active and visual learning. Based on these findings, specific recommendations and issues for educators to consider are presented.Item How to Write a Visualization Survey Paper: A Starting Point(The Eurographics Association, 2019) McNabb, Liam; Laramee, Robert S.; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThis paper attempts to explain the mechanics of writing a survey paper in data visualization or visual analytics. It serves as a useful starting point for those who have never written a survey paper or have very little experience. A literature review or survey paper is often considered the starting point of a PhD candidate's scientific degree. However, there are no dedicated papers that focus on guidelines for the planning or writing of a survey paper or literature review in visualization or visual analytics. We provide guidelines and our recommendations for a foundational structure on which to build a survey paper, whilst also considering intermediate goals, and offer helpful advice to improve the survey process and literature analysis. The result is a useful starting point for those wishing to write a survey paper or state-of-the-art (STAR) review in visualization or visual analytics. The guidelines and recommendations we make can also be generalized to other areas of computing and science. An abstract is a required feature of a survey paper and should identity the topic of the literature review. A good abstract addresses why the given topic is interesting and why it is helpful. A good abstract features the following elements: (1) topic introduction, (2) the motivation, (3) the goal of the review, and the benefits the review provides to the reader. A good literature survey offers a helpful classification of the literature, mature areas of research, and open, unsolved problems in visualization or visual analytics.Item Do contests improve students skills in Computer Graphics? The case of API8(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Palus, Jean-Pascal; Belhadj, Farès; Bourdin, Jean-Jacques; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThis paper presents a contest designed to improve the skills of students in Computer Graphics. The contest is adapted to the current skills of the students and uses a public graphic library. Students then have to produce a demo, generally a program which presents an animation. The main result presented in this paper is that with an appropriate set of tools, students program interesting demos to participate in the contest and their skills in Computer Graphics seem to improve significantly.Item A Breadth-First Introduction to VFX: A Holistic Approach for Teaching the Visual Effects Production Pipeline(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Redford, Adam; Fodritto, Melania; Anderson, Eike Falk; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThis paper outlines a tried and tested breadth-first approach for teaching essential key areas of the visual effects post production pipeline to novices. Successfully used in a first semester course our holistic process guides the creation of a single self-contained visual effects shot (video sequence) of photorealistic quality. We provide an overview of course curriculum, organization and exercises (lessons covering the essential areas of visual effects production for creating each of the individual elements of the final shot, as well as the final shot construction and composition itself), outline the assessment and discuss the evolution of the course, which we consider a model of ''best practice'' for teaching the 3D artists' introductory computer graphics sequence.Item Vegetable Matter Decay: An Exceptional Student 'Innovations' Project(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Anderson, Eike Falk; Cirdei, Bianca; Adzhiev, Valery; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricWe present an outstanding undergraduate research project that has resulted in the development of a parametrised method for simulating drying and decaying vegetable matter from the fruits category, taking into account the biological characteristics of the decaying fruit. This work was awarded 1st place in the undergraduate category of the ACM Student Research Competition at SIGGRAPH 2018.Item EUROGRAPHICS 2019: Education Papers Frontmatter(Eurographics Association, 2019) Tarini, Marco; Galin, Eric; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricItem Teaching Computer Graphics Based on a Commercial Product(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Smith, Gregory; Sung, Kelvin; Tarini, Marco and Galin, EricThe challenges in designing an introductory Computer Graphics (CG) course include selecting an appropriate and coherent set of topics, keeping up-to-date with the rapidly evolving industry, and aligning with the many students' fascinations that tend to stem from flashy popular media. This paper analyzes and classifies existing introductory CG classes according to their approaches in trading-off between covering foundation algorithms and focusing on application-level knowledge. The paper then observes that many application-level courses challenge students in learning and applying relevant CG concepts by building familiar graphical applications. Within this context, the paper points out that many modern commercial graphical applications, including popular game engines and 3D modeling systems, support well-defined and robust run-time scripting interfaces that allow modification and/or replacement of default system functional modules. These observations suggest the potentials of delivering an introductory CG class based on one of these commercial graphical systems. This paper proposes a set of guidelines to ensure such a class will educate CG practitioners rather than commercial product users. Based on these guidelines and an existing application-based introductory CG course, a new set of learning outcomes is derived which is independent of any specific commercial product. The paper continues to describe the implementation of a new course using the Unity3D game engine as the delivery vehicle. This paper then describes the associated teaching materials, details the hands-on programming assignments, and discusses student learning from the Unity3D-based introductory CG class. The results from two consecutive batches of students demonstrated that a commercial graphical product-based approach to teaching an introductory CG class could be effective, welcomed by students, and supply students the concepts to build practical graphical applications after the class.