A no-API Approach to an Introductory Computer Graphics Course

Many introductory computer graphics courses rely on the use of an established, GPU-inspired API to assist students in completing their programming assignments. However, as GPUs become more advanced, so too do the APIs used to interface with them, and as such, the complexity of using these modern APIs can sometimes overshadow the learning of basic graphics concepts that assignments are meant to illustrate. In this paper, we present an introductory course in computer graphics that takes an alternate approach whereby students do not make use of any API, instead creating their own rasterization engine written from scratch using an OpenGL-like shader-based architecture. We present the syllabus, course structure, and assignments for the course and share our observations on student learning from sections offered over the past several years.