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Executive Summary and Recommendations

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 SIGGRAPH would look to mirror the AGOCG site.

 

We agreed that we should 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 are clips of things — images, models, programs etc. Perspectives present 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 to review HyperGraph and HyperVis with a view to some restructuring.

 

Link to Knowledge Gallery

The Knowledge Gallery is a joint venture between the commercial and HE sectors in the UK to provide a gateway to image-related resources. It was agreed that this presented a possibility for achieving some of our aims and we should monitor this. We are working internationally and need to ensure availability beyond UK.

 

Potential resources are from: SoftImage, PIXAR, SIGGRAPH, EG.

 

We would like to see it include polygonal and non polygonal models, worked examples, MPEG clips, clips from our 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 are recommended for the pilot:

 

• animation

• visualization techniques

 

These would include the following resources:

 

raw materials - images, movies, VRML, scripts

linking text

annotated biography

links to projects/information sources

teaching datasets

multiple choice self assessment - QMWeb

FAQs - probably using AnswerWeb

 

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 HE 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 mathematics of students is a problem for departments.

 

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