ITCS 4120-5120: Official and Recommended Prerequisites
Professor Zachary Wartell
Last Modified: 8/22/2006 2:42:51 PM
Copyright August 2006, Zachary Wartell @ UNCC
1. Purpose
As the UNCC Visualization Center gains notoriety, an increasing number of students coming to UNCC are attracted to the nifty area of computer graphics. As the primary teacher for ITCS 4120-5120 since 2005, I am receiving an increasing number of student inquiries regarding the perquisites for ITCS 4120-5120. This is a good thing! Computer graphics is a core hardware and software technology in entertainment, scientific, medical, engineering and educational visualization, virtual reality and training, graphical user interfaces, among many other fields.
This document is an attempt to answer these student questions regarding prerequisites for ITCS 4120-5120 in a reasonably thorough manner.
For other information (syllabus, lecture slides, etc.) see the class website:
www.cs.uncc.edu/~zwartell/ITCS 4120-5120/current/web page/ITCS 4120 - Wartell.html
2. Prerequisites
Official Prerequisites
The official UNCC course catalog states:
“Topics: Graphics hardware; raster algorithms; geometric transformations; 2D/3D interactive graphics; 3D viewing and perspective projections; color and lighting models; hidden surface removal; modeling hierarchies; fractals; curved surfaces.
Prerequisites: (Undergraduate level ITCS 2214 Minimum Grade of D or Undergraduate level CSCI 214 Minimum Grade of D) and Undergraduate level MATH 2164 Minimum Grade of D”
Dr. Wartell’s Unofficial “Prerequisites”
The official catalog prerequisites are very minimal and are limited by the ability of the UNCC BANNER registration system to enforce more complex prerequisites. Additionally, in the first 10 minutes of the first class in ITCS 4120-5120, I discuss my strongly recommended unofficial prerequisites.
ITCS 4120/5120 is a C++ programming intensive course. When I took my first senior level computer graphics course in 1993 (in C) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the professor outright stated “If you don’t already know C, this is a bad course during which to try and pick it up.” As of August 2006, I am trying to be more flexible in ITCS 4120-5120 at UNCC as compared to taking the type of hard-line taken by my professor years ago.
Dr. Wartell’s strongly recommended unofficial prerequisites are as follows:
1) Official prerequisites must be met
2) Students should be Juniors/Seniors or Masters Students
3) Students must have strong programming and debugging skills
4) Language Experience, either:
a. you have 1 or 2 semesters worth of experience programming in C++
or
b. you have 3-4 semesters combined programming experience in Java and/or C++ plus
i. you understand low-level programming from experiences such as
1. ITCS 3182 Computer Organization and Architecture
2. or ITCS 3110 Compiler Construction
3. or have programmed in C (1 semester)
4. or have programmed in assembly language (1 semester)
ii. and you are capable of learning a new programming language primarily on your own
ITCS 4120-5120 is probably seen by students as programming intensive, data structure intensive and algorithm intensive and math intensive (within the official course catalog prerequisites).
In the first lecture I present the following slide:
I also present the following slide which is an estimate of how the material in ITCS 4120-5120 breaks down into these different areas percentages:
Finally, the specific compiler and integrate development environment (IDE) and other programming tools used for the class vary from semester to semester. These tools are listed in the slides from Lecture #1 found on the course webpage:
www.cs.uncc.edu/~zwartell/ITCS 4120-5120/current/web page/ITCS 4120 - Wartell.html
If you have further questions about whether computer graphics (as a computer science discipline) is for you the best thing to do is:
- stop by the bookstore or library and peruse the textbook (see [1])
- visit the class website [1] and peruse the lecture slides for both Lecture #1 and at at least one latter Lecture
- contact me
I hope this document gives the reader a better understanding of what a standard first semester Computer Graphics course is about and what type of work and skills it involves for students. For further questions email me at .
3. Citations
[1] www.cs.uncc.edu/~zwartell/ITCS 4120-5120/current/web page/ITCS 4120 - Wartell.html. ITCS 4120-5120 Introduction to Computer Graphics. Zachary Wartell, 2006.