Abstract Graphical Problem Solving and Visual Communication in the Beginning Computer Graphics Course

The beginning computer graphics course can teach much more than just computer graphics. It can also provide an excellent introduction to graphical problem solving and visual communication, and in so doing can be an excellent complement to other computer science courses that teach more analytical problem solving. This paper describes the graphical problem-solving and visual communication contexts and discusses how they can be supported by the beginning computer graphics course. 1 Problem solving in the computer science curriculum A graduate of our program recently visited campus to recruit other students, and told us “In my group, we want to hire people with problem solving abilities. We have found that task-oriented people just want the answer and seem to stumble when they run into a problem, while problemsolving people tend to want to know what's causing the problem so they can come up with a solution. The problem solving I learned as a student gave me the skills to tackle increasingly complex problems and move up the ladder in my company.” Those of us who teach computer science take great pride in the fact that our students learn the kind of problem solving described above by our graduate. We use textbooks for our beginning courses with titles such as Programming and Problem Solving in C++ (or C, or Java, or once upon a time Pascal, or...) and we put significant emphasis on analyzing problems, breaking them down into component parts, and designing solutions with various kinds of programming tools. We then rely on the problem solving skills that students learn in our early courses as we teach more advanced courses, and our students rely on these skills when they graduate and go into advanced studies or professional employment. In many ways, one might say that problem solving in a computational setting is perhaps the most important value-added part of a computer science education