“CGEMS – Computer Graphics Educational Materials Serve” by Figueiredo, Eber and Jorge

Computer graphics has evolved considerably over the past few decades. As computer science, digital arts, and other areas of study that use computer graphics continue to evolve and gain new substance, educators have come to master new content and achieve deeper understandings of computers and imagery. As the core field becomes more mature, educators in all computer graphics disciplines have a greater need for high-quality curricular resources. Offering excellent educational materials is an important service to the community of educators. Such support will empower both young and seasoned educators alike to benefit from and contribute to the work of others. In this way, we can achieve a higher standard of teaching worldwide.

The purpose of our work is to provide tools to foster such a community of computer graphics educators. We will present a system that will act as the means for their work to be appraised, assessed and made available to others through an online server for refereed educational content in computer graphics.

In this paper we describe the basis for and highlight some of the starting requirements of CGEMS, the online Computer Graphics Educational Materials Server. This is organized around a web-based groupware application that supports the submission, review, acquisition, and archiving of curricular resources.

This work was supported in part by the European Commission grant Alfa II-0072A and by a Eurographics and SIGGRAPH Education Board special projects fund. The authors are especially indebted to Rhonda Schauer for her excellent contributions concerning stylesheets and browser independence. We are also grateful to Sónia Assunção who worked on the initial design. We would like to thank Steve Cunningham and Judy Brown for many comments and suggestions.