Thursday, 4 August

3:15 - 4:35 pm

Thursday, 4 August

3:15 - 4:35 pm

Room 502B

Recent trends have generated more focus on game design as a topic for teaching in higher education. Although many game engines currently exist, few of them were designed with educational goals in mind. This paper distinguishes between industry-oriented engines and instructional game engines designed to teach a range of concepts. The features needed to teach game development to college undergraduates in engineering and the humanities are explored. Specifically, the authors developed a platform that supports incremental education in game design: GameX, an open-source instructional game engine that was used to initiate the Game Design Initiative in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.

Rama Hoetzlein

University of California
Santa Barbara
rch (at) umail.ucsb.edu

David Schwartz

Cornell University

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Thursday, 4 August

3:15 - 4:35 pm

Room 502B

A large-scale, immersive virtual-environment-based parachute descent simulator has been developed and deployed in the Air and Space Gallery at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, UK. The unattended interactive installation promotes interaction and understanding of the underlying physics involved. The installation is based on the recent successful testing of Leonardo da Vinci's parachute design of 1483, but it allows users to modify attributes of the parachute and environmental conditions. User feedback and learning outcomes have been assessed with positive results. The simulator contains a number of novel features that promote group interaction and discussion. The lessons learned from this project will prove useful in informing future large-scale immersive exhibits in public spaces.

Nick J Avis

Cardiff University

n.j.avis (at) cs.cardiff.ac.uk

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Thursday, 4 August

3:15 - 4:35 pm

Room 502B

The most exciting recent advance in computer graphics has been the development of programmable graphics processing units (GPUs). This paper summarizes different approaches to and some of the issues involved in teaching the use of GPUs.

G. Scott Owen

Georgia State University
owen (at) siggraph.org

Bryson Payne

Georgia College & State University

Ying Zhu
Jeff Chastine

Georgia State University

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Thursday, 4 August

3:15 - 4:35 pm

Room 502B

This paper presents two technologies, code-based interactivity and server-side compiling, that add value to an educational repository and address the challenges of achieving a critical mass of submissions. These technologies are part of current efforts in the computer graphics community to collect, preserve, and share educational material. This novel repository service introduces "live" graphics gems to the material: modifiable program listings with corresponding interactivities that are compiled and versioned on the server side. Repository material evolves on the fly. Authors who are not willing to submit their material as open source are given a granular source control. The paper describes the implications of this approach (for example, a common, repository-driven content markup, didactics of code-based interactivity, and crucial technical services and tools). Prototype implementations and showcases are included.

Johannes Görke

Universität Tübingen
goerke (at) gris.uni-tuebingen.de

Frank Hanisch

Wolfgang Straßer
WSI/GRIS Universität Tübingen

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