I teach two courses at UIC/College of Architecture and Art, The School of the Art & Design.  They are AD 408 Advanced Computer Graphics - Introduction, and AD 205 Introduction to Computer Graphics.  The content of both courses teach beginning and advanced concepts in the use of Programming for Computer Graphics, as opposed to the use of software packages to create the final product.

AD 408 Advanced Computer Graphics teaches students how to program in C/C++ and OpenGL on the SGI platform within a UNIX environment.  This course is an introduction to the use of the OpenGL libraries, a starting point for both undergraduate and graduate students in the Electronic Visualization program.  Students go on to use C/C++ and OpenGL for programming in the CAVE.

AD 205 Introduction to Computer Graphics teaches students who either have no experience in computers or computer graphics or as an introduction to Programming for computer graphics.  Currently the course deals with creating World Wide Web sites and documents.  First by the use of GUI based web page/site development software.  This includes the use of Image creation, manipulation, and processing software.  Students then reverse engineer the code originally generated by the web software.  The object of the course is to learn HTML, and Javascript, not neccesararily another software package that has limitations.  The lab utilized for this course uses PC's, and is new as of Summer 1999.  The Student Government granted initial monies to update the old lab which consisted of  486, 386, and even 286 computers.  The lab now has twenty new 400mhz Celeron machines.

Both AD 408 and AD 205 are structured so the student understands that through the use of programming, the limitions of the computer as a tool in the generation of Art has no bounds just wide open vistas of the imagination.