Basic Info

A Syllabus may mean different things to different people.

If you are looking for a concise description of how the course works, see the Course Overview. If you are looking for a schedule of the topics covered in class see the Calendar. If you’re looking for the University official syllabus, you can find it on AEFIS (since that is the repository of official University Syllabi). A copy of that document will be available from this web page.

This class is meant to teach you about Computer Graphics. Computer Graphics is the study of how we make pictures with computers. The focus of the class is teaching you the key ideas of computer graphics.

The class will also teach you about how to do interactive graphics programming. We will use web technologies for this. On one hand, doing interactive web programming is a means to an end: you need to program graphics in order to really learn it. But, learning to build interactive applications for the web is a useful skill in its own right.

Here is a brief overview of what the class is and how it works. You may also want to see the Getting Started page.

The course staff is available to provide help!

The staff for CS559 this semester includes the Professor, 3 Teaching Assistants (graduate students), and 4 Peer Mentors (undergraduate students). We work together as a team, and are all available to help you. Feel free to contact the course staff via Piazza. At least one member of the course staff will be available during Getting Help (Consulting Hours). Also see the Getting Help page. Read formatted page...

Because this class is being delivered remotely, you will need to provide your own equipment for class. The requirements aren’t much different than any other class. You’ll need a capable computer, a decent internet connection, a camera, and the ability to do audio and video for communications.

This class will cover roughly the same material as we did in the Spring of 2020 (and the Spring of 2019). In Spring of 2020, we lost a little time as we transitioned to remote instruction when the COVID pandemic began, so at the end, we missed a few topics (we didn’t talk about rendering). This is the course outline for the Spring of 2020. It shows you the topics we covered - which will be very similar to the topics we cover this year. Read more…

You are not required to purchase books for this class.

All required readings will be provided online. Some of the readings are provided under academic fair use, and are only for students in the class. For this reason, they will be provided via the course Canvas page.

JavaScript does not require you to declare the types of your variables, function arguments, objects, object properties, or much of anything. However, if you give it some hints as to what you expect (as comments in your code), you can help a reader understand your program, and software tools find mistakes.

This page describes some programming practices that are recommended for CS559.

Programming assignments in CS559 will use the Javascript programming language. We will help you learn Javascript, if you aren’t already familiar with it.

We recommend using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) for doing the programming assignments in CS559. For other suggestions, see the tools page.

You will need to use some text editor for editing JavaScript programs and web pages (e.g., html and css files).

It is worth investing your time in learning to use good tools (like VSCode).

Syllabus

Learning Goals

Course Overview

Getting Help

Course Staff

Technical Requirements

Outline of Spring 2020

Books

Typed JavaScript and CS559

Javascript in CS559

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) for CS559

Tools for 559