Teaching and Applying Computer Graphics using the Visualization Toolkit Paulo Dias, Joaquim Madeira, Beatriz Sousa Santos Dept. of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics / IEETA University of Aveiro Campus Universit´ ario de Santiago, P-3810-193 Portugal Abstract In the last two years, we have been using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) as a tool for teaching and applying Computer Graphics, for Computer Engineering students who chose to attend the elective “3D Modeling and Visualization” course. Students have not only to use VTK in about half of their lab classes, in order to accomplish some tasks and gain some knowledge on VTK’s features and function- alities, but they are also required to develop a visualization application based on VTK. We present first the motivation for using VTK and the main features of the “3D Modeling and Visualization” course. Afterwards, we describe some of the most successful projects developed by our students. Then, we globally analyze the effec- tiveness of using VTK, and present the results of the questionnaire handed out to the students who attended the course in the last semester. Key words: Computer Graphics Education, Visualization Toolkit, VTK 1 Introduction In the last few years we have been witnessing a discussion on how to better teach Computer Graphics (CG) to students in different areas [7,9,12,2,11,14]. In the past, a bottom-up approach was normally used, where students had to build all necessary code (almost) from scratch. Later, many educators switched to a top-down approach, based on using a higher-level API such as OpenGL or Email addresses: paulo.dias@det.ua.pt (Paulo Dias), jmadeira@det.ua.pt (Joaquim Madeira), bss@det.ua.pt (Beatriz Sousa Santos). Preprint submitted to Elsevier 11 March 2007