Teaching and Applying Computer Graphics using the Visualization Toolkit

In the last two years, we have been using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) as a tool for teaching and applying Computer Graphics, for Computer Engineering students who chose to attend the elective “3D Modeling and Visualization” course. Students have not only to use VTK in about half of their lab classes, in order to accomplish some tasks and gain some knowledge on VTK’s features and functionalities, but they are also required to develop a visualization application based on VTK. We present first the motivation for using VTK and the main features of the “3D Modeling and Visualization” course. Afterwards, we describe some of the most successful projects developed by our students. Then, we globally analyze the effectiveness of using VTK, and present the results of the questionnaire handed out to the students who attended the course in the last semester.