Do you have links to any resources the students found handy? I'm not very familiar with anything to do with the graphics stack other than familiarity with some of the words.
I'm not the author of the original comment, but when I was in high school I found the Graphics Programming Black Book to be useful for understanding graphics primitives and how they can be implemented in software. It's available for free online: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-p...
Thanks, this is a great read (even though parts seem dated, for example, the TOC has chapters on the 386 and 486), I'm surprised that I haven't stumbled upon it before.
The latest Core i7 still has all the same instructions as a 386 or 486, so while these days you'd probably use SIMD instructions, the code will still run and run very, very fast.
Maybe start with chapter 38: http://downloads.gamedev.net/pdf/gpbb/gpbb38.pdf