Lectures: I am trying to get beyond the 75 minute monologue style, but there will probably be a lot of that. I believe that lectures are more useful when they are more interactive, and have the students do things beyond just listening, but I am still trying to figure out how to achieve that.
Readings: Each week (maybe organized by lecture, but maybe by week) you will be given a list of things to read to learn about the concepts we’re talking about in class and using in the projects/assignments. There is no textbook: all readings will be provided on the web. Some will be “tutorials” that I write, some will be portions of books, some will be other articles.
Assignments: Most weeks, we’ll have small “written” assignments (although these are usually done online, and always turned in online). Some of the “bigger” assignments will involve you making pictures using tools, or writing small pieces of programs that get used inside of online tools. Sometimes, these assignments will be there to give you practice with the concepts in class, other times they will be there to make sure you’re ready to do things in the future.
Programming Assignments: Some assignments we will ask you to write a small program to create the answer for the assignment. For these assignments, it might even be possible to do things by hand – but you probably will want to write a program. For these assignments, you may use any language you want – what we care about is that you complete the assignment, and turn in a valid answer. However, you might want to do more. And you might want to use this as a practice for the tools in the programming projects. We expect that all programming assignments will involve reading and writing text files (that describe geometry or images).
Programming Mini-Projects: We will have 2, approximately 3 week, programming projects. For these, you will be given some framework code (a program missing features). You have the option of re-implementing everything from scratch, but this is generally a bad idea. The projects will have some well defined objectives, but also have an open-ended aspect so you can go above and beyond. The framework code will be in C++, use OpenGL, and have been developed under Windows using Visual Studio. There is no requirement that you use these tools – you could re-write the framework in some other language on some other machine. But this would just be extra work for you. Also, your program must run under Windows
Exams: We will have a midterm and a final.
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