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Careful where you say that :-) In 2002, when I was doing my second year at college, my professor was cool enough to let me submit an animation of the self-balancing insertion algorithm for AVL trees. Those were the years of Macromedia Flash and Director. It was a cool project, and I wish I had kept the files. Overall, it was a highly technical thing. Twenty and so years later, I still do animations, even if only as a hobby. These days I use Blender, Houdini, and my own Python scripts and node systems, and my purpose is purely artistic. Something that is as true today as it was twenty years ago is that computer animation remains highly technical. If an artist wants to animate some dude moving around, they will need to understand coordinate systems, rotations, directed acyclic graphs and things like that. Plus a big bunch of specific DCC concepts and idiosyncrasies. The trade is such that one may end up having to implement their own computational geometry algorithms. Those in turn require a good understanding of general data structures and algorithms, and of floating point math and when to upgrade it or ditch it and switch to exact fractions. Topology too becomes a tool for certain needs; for example, one may want to animate the surface of a lake and find out that a mapping from 3D to 2D and back is a very handy tool[^1]. I daresay that creating a Word or even a Latex document with some (or a lot of) formulas remains easier. But if I were the director of a school and a student expressed that videos are easier to understand, I would use it as an excuse to force everybody to learn the computer animation craft. [^1]: Of course it's also possible to do animations by simply drawing everything by hand in two dimensions, but that requires its own set of skills and talent, and it is extremely labor-intensive. It's also possible to use AI, but getting AI to create a good, coherent and consistent animation is still an open problem. |