EG 2021 - Education Papers

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Education Papers I
Teaching Data-driven Video Processing via Crowdsourced Data Collection
Max Reimann, Ole Wegen, Sebastian Pasewaldt, Amir Semmo, Jürgen Döllner, and Matthias Trapp
A Virtual Reality Platform for Immersive Education in Computer Graphics
Filip Hácha, Petr Vanecek, and Libor Váša
Education Papers II
Conveying Firsthand Experience: The Circuit Parcours Technique for Efficient and Engaging Teaching in Courses about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
Ralf Dörner and Robin Horst
VisGuided: A Community-driven Approach for Education in Visualization
Alexandra Diehl, Elif E. Firat, Thomas Torsney-Weir, Alfie Abdul-Rahman, Benjamin Bach, Robert Laramee, Renato Pajarola, and Min Chen
Teaching 3D Computer Animation to Non-programming Experts
Dan Casas
Project in Visualization and Data Analysis: Experiences in Designing and Coordinating the Course
Kostiantyn Kucher, Rafael M. Martins, and Andreas Kerren
Reconstructing the Past: Outstanding Student-Created Virtual Heritage Experiences
Eike Falk Anderson
Education Papers III
Teaching Computer Graphics During Pandemic using Observable Notebook
Sumanta N. Pattanaik and Alexis Benamira
Marching Cubes for Teaching GLSL Programming
Ivaylo Ilinkin

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    Teaching Data-driven Video Processing via Crowdsourced Data Collection
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Reimann, Max; Wegen, Ole; Pasewaldt, Sebastian; Semmo, Amir; Döllner, Jürgen; Trapp, Matthias; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    This paper presents the concept and experience of teaching an undergraduate course on data-driven image and video processing. When designing visual effects that make use of Machine Learning (ML) models for image-based analysis or processing, the availability of training data typically represents a key limitation when it comes to feasibility and effect quality. The goal of our course is to enable students to implement new kinds of visual effects by acquiring training datasets via crowdsourcing that are used to train ML models as part of a video processing pipeline. First, we propose our course structure and best practices that are involved with crowdsourced data acquisitions. We then discuss the key insights we gathered from an exceptional undergraduate seminar project that tackles the challenging domain of video annotation and learning. In particular, we focus on how to practically develop annotation tools and collect high-quality datasets using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in the budget- and time-constrained classroom environment. We observe that implementing the full acquisition and learning pipeline is entirely feasible for a seminar project, imparts hands-on problem solving skills, and promotes undergraduate research.
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    A Virtual Reality Platform for Immersive Education in Computer Graphics
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Hácha, Filip; Vanecek, Petr; Váša, Libor; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    We present a general framework for teaching 3D imagination demanding topics using commonly available hardware for virtual reality (VR). Our software allows collaborating on 3D objects, interaction and annotation in a simple and intuitive manner. Students can follow the exposition from an arbitrary, naturally chosen point of view, and they interact with the shared scene by adding annotations and using a pointing metaphore. The software allows using various VR headsets as well as opting for a traditional 3D rendering on a 2D screen. The framework has been tested in a small course on polygon mesh processing, identifying and eliminating the most serious flaws. In its current form, most of the sources of friction have been addressed and the system can be employed in a variety of teaching scenarios.
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    Teaching 3D Computer Animation to Non-programming Experts
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Casas, Dan; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    This paper describes a Computer Animation course aimed at novice Computer Science and Engineering students with minimal programming skills. We observe that students enrolled in Computer Graphics (and related) undergraduate degrees usually face a Computer Animation subject early in their programs, sometimes even before they develop strong software development and programming skills. This causes that assignments and tasks where students should focus on the Computer Animation concepts, end up in frustration and massive efforts to just get over-complicated developing frameworks running. Instead, we propose a Computer Animation course based on small MATLAB tasks that covers a large range of topics and it is adapted to students with minimal programming skills. For each topic, we provide a brief theoretical summary and links to fundamental literature, as well as a set of hands-on tasks with the necessary source code to get started. A user study shows that students who took this course were able to better focus on the fundamental concepts of the subject, circumventing the need to learn advanced programming skills. Course material is available on a public GitHub repository, and solutions are provided upon request from course tutors.
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    Conveying Firsthand Experience: The Circuit Parcours Technique for Efficient and Engaging Teaching in Courses about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Dörner, Ralf; Horst, Robin; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    Providing the opportunity for hands-on experience is crucial when teaching courses about Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). However, the workload on the educator's side for providing these opportunities might be prohibitive. In addition, other organizational challenges can arise, for example, demonstrations of VR/AR application in a course might be too time-consuming, especially if the course is attended by many students. We present the Circuit Parcours Technique to meet these challenges. Here, in a well-organized event, stations with VR/AR demonstrations are provided in parallel, and students are enlisted to prepare and conduct the demonstrations. The event is embedded in a four-phase model. In this education paper, the technique is precisely described, examples for its flexible usage in different teaching situations are provided, advantages such as time efficiency are discussed, and lessons learned are shared from our experience with using this method for more than 10 years. Moreover, learning goals are identified that can be achieved with this technique besides gaining personal experience.
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    VisGuided: A Community-driven Approach for Education in Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Diehl, Alexandra; Firat, Elif E.; Torsney-Weir, Thomas; Abdul-Rahman, Alfie; Bach, Benjamin; Laramee, Robert; Pajarola, Renato; Chen, Min; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    We propose a novel educational approach for teaching visualization, using a community-driven and participatory methodology that extends the traditional course boundaries from the classroom to the broader visualization community.We use a visualization community project, VisGuides, as the main platform to support our educational approach. We evaluate our new methodology by means of three use cases from two different universities. Our contributions include the proposed methodology, the discussion on the outcome of the use cases, the benefits and limitations of our current approach, and a reflection on the open problems and noteworthy gaps to improve the current pedagogical techniques to teach visualization and promote critical thinking. Our findings show extensive benefits from the use of our approach in terms of the number of transferable skills to students, educational resources for educators, and additional feedback for research opportunities to the visualization community.
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    Project in Visualization and Data Analysis: Experiences in Designing and Coordinating the Course
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Kucher, Kostiantyn; Martins, Rafael M.; Kerren, Andreas; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    Visual analytics involves both visual and computational components for empowering human analysts who face the challenges of making sense and making use of large and heterogeneous data sets in various application domains. In order to facilitate the learning process for the students at higher education institutions with regard to both the theoretical knowledge and practical skills in visual analytics, the respective courses must cover a variety of topics and include multiple assessment methods and activities. In this paper, we report on the design and first instantiation of a full term project-based course in visualization and data analysis, which was recently offered to graduate and post-graduate students at our department and met with positive feedback from the course participants.
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    Reconstructing the Past: Outstanding Student-Created Virtual Heritage Experiences
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Anderson, Eike Falk; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    In recent years, Computer Graphics (CG) and related techniques have become increasingly important for the preservation and dissemination of Cultural Heritage (CH). Here we present a set of three excellent CH reconstructions and virtual heritage experiences created by final year undergraduate students from several computer animation related programmes of study in the course of an optional course on ''CG and Animation for Cultural Heritage''. The three projects discussed here are interactive heritage experiences, including a reconstruction of the tomb of Tutankhamun, an Augmented Reality (AR) reconstruction of the Iron Age hillfort Maiden Castle, and a Virtual Reality (VR) reconstruction of ancient Stonehenge.
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    Marching Cubes for Teaching GLSL Programming
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Ilinkin, Ivaylo; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    This paper shares ideas for illustrating GLSL programming based on the classic Marching Cubes algorithm. The algorithm has a number of appealing aspects: it is feasible to implement as one of the components in a computer graphics course, it motivates naturally a number of GLSL concepts and constructs, and leaves the students with a sense of accomplishment having reproduced original research. The paper suggest possible variations and extensions that could form the basis for final group projects.
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    Teaching Computer Graphics During Pandemic using Observable Notebook
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Pattanaik, Sumanta N.; Benamira, Alexis; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    Most schools and colleges around the world have resorted to remote teaching during this Covid-19 pandemic. Faced with this challenge we experimented with a novel supplement to standard video lecturing to teach our normal face-to-face large undergraduate graphics class (close to 150 students). This supplement involved using Observable notebook, and turned out to be very effective for remote teaching. We wish to continue its use even after college life turns normal, and would like to share our experience with the community and encourage such use for teaching introductory computer graphics courses.
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    EUROGRAPHICS 2021: Education Papers Frontmatter
    (Eurographics Association, 2021) Sousa Santos, Beatriz; Domik, Gitta; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta