[ricardobayes]

Even after 10 years I still have anxiety looking at OpenGL code. I still don't understand why we needed to write ray-tracing during a BSc course starting from a blinking cursor. The professor tried to defend that at the time, but I firmly believe that it is the wrong curriculum for a 20 year old CS student. Computer graphics were and are niche programming, and should not be taught main-stream. Out of 100 graduates maybe one will ever use this, why not use some common sense and teach something useful?

[skywal_l]

Because graphics is fun. It's a good way to engage with students. Beside, what's important is not the outcome but the journey. You learn to read documentation, to design, to debug and more importantly you learn to learn. Which is what higher education is about.

[npteljes]

Education is about exercising the mind. I don't think many play with inflated balls in their adulthood, yet it's very important to teach children hand-eye coordination, team play, and other concepts so that they become better functioning humans.

There are problems with the curriculum though, one of them that it plays catch-up with the state of the world. IT in particular moves very fast. Graphics programming is not one of these things however. For example, if you've done the courses, and experiences just how hard it is to crate anything in 3d, you can better appreciate the work that goes into modern 3d engines. Look at this beautiful breakdown of the inner workings of the GTA V engine:

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic...

[NavinF]

inb4 you get 10 replies along the lines of "wow I wish my professors let me do something cool like ray-tracing. I spent 4 years implementing cache-inefficient data structures that nobody uses in an ancient version of some programming language that nobody uses in a crappy env doesn't even have a real debugger"

Not that I can relate. I dropped out of uni well before I encountered anything that would discourage me from going into software :)