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Training Reports Workshops Briefings Index

Supporting the Teaching of Computer Graphics, Visualization, Multimedia and Virtual Environments

This workshop was held 29 - 31 May 1996 at Burleigh Court. We had 20 people at the event including Scott Owen (Georgia State University) and Gitta Domik (University of Paderborn, Germany) from the SIGGRAPH Education Committee.

The full report will be available as an AGOCG technical report and on the World Wide Web (WWW) pages. Contact me for a paper copy. AGOCG are hoping to take up at least some of the recommendations and to circulate them widely.

Liaison between AGOCG and SIGGRAPH Education Committee

There is a lot to be gained from increased liaison as we have similar aims in mind - supporting educators through provision of materials and through collaboration.

It was agreed that we ought to mirror the SIGGRAPH Education WWW site in the UK and that they should mirror the AGOCG site.

We agreed that we would work together to develop materials of common interest.

What Sort of Resources do we want?

We had a lot of debate about the need for flexible resources and distinguished between "raw materials" and "perspectives" on these. Raw materials would be clips of things - images, models, programs etc. Perspectives would be a view of the raw materials - an overview of resources available, a courseware module including the raw materials - this would be a personal view of the materials. In this sense Hypergraph is Scott Owen's perspective on a set of resources. We felt that one of the problems with materials that have been developed is that they are too complete and that people do want to have raw materials to enable them to put together their own perspective.

It was agreed that we needed to review HyperGraph and HyperVis
and suggest some restructuring.

Link to the Knowledge Gallery

The Knowledge Gallery (see article by Graphics Co-ordinator) offers a possibility for achieving some of our aims and we should monitor this. We are working internationally and need to ensure availability beyond the UK. Potential sources of resources are:
Participants agreed that they would like to see it include polygonal and non­p;polygonal models, worked examples, MPEG clips, clips from the proposed pilot studies (see below).

Quality Assurance

We need to set up an Editorial Board to recommend and evaluate resources to be made available.

Range of Resources

We want more than just clips and text. We want other resources such as contacts, exam questions, self assessment, collaboration tools, FAQs etc.

Pilot Studies

It was recommended that we should conduct some pilot studies of particular areas to see if we can put together the kind of range of raw materials which would be useful. This detailed work would then raise the issues that need to be addressed when the topic materials were broadened.

The following topics were recommended for the pilot: These would include the following resources:

Teaching Virtual Environments

This emerged as having different needs due to the different level of maturity of the subject and the cost of equipment. There is a need for a central repository of resources and conversion tools for taking these at different levels of detail. We need to have UK Higher Education access to high level immersive facilities to give students exposure to what is possible. We need to keep raising awareness of current technology. The poor mathematical ability of students is a problem for departments.

Anne Mumford
a.m.mumford@lboro.ac.uk