When I teach computer graphics, many of my students are mainly interested in learning how to make things that look cool and pretty. This is understandable.
But I don’t think that teaching how to make pretty things is really what computer graphics is about. It is actually, at core, about conveying visual ideas.
As the great Lance Williams liked to say, computer graphics is “limited only by your imagination.” Having accurate surface reflectance or a high polygon count is nice, but it really isn’t the core of why computer simulated imagery is so amazing.
The truly wonderful and amazing thing about CGI is how you can use it to get across concepts and ideas that would be difficult or impossible to convey any other way. When we see things that make visual sense, which feel as though they should exist — but which do not actually exist in our own world — our minds begin to open up.
And after taking in those new visual possibilities, we might start to expand our ways of thinking. We might become more than we were.
And isn’t that what education is all about?