[clarry]

Nope, you totally don't need matrices to rotate, scale, and translate stuff. It's all very simple addition, multiplication and a wee tiny bit of trigonometry. As trivial as the perspective divide. In a 3D renderer, this is among the simplest and most straightforward of things. You can take it step by step and each step should be pretty straightforward to explain and illustrate. That is what is needed to build intuition and dispel the magic. After that, matrices are just a convenient abstraction, and perhaps more importantly, a reasonable way to express your intent to the underlying graphics library or hardware. Which you don't necessarily want to use.

[alejohausner]

Agreed: moving, turning and stretching don't need matrices, to be understood. But moving the camera away from (0 0 0) is going to require a change of coordinates. I'm not sure how to explain that process in a simple way that avoids matrices.