An Introductory Course on Graphical-Interactive Systems: Combining Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Graphics

In this paper we report on five years of teaching experience with our introductory course “Graphical-Interactive Systems”, which covers basic Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Graphics (CG) topics for students in the third year of their major in computer science. Although the two fields of HCI and CG are usually taught in different courses, we believe that they have much in common and can therefore be integrated into a combined course. “Graphical-Interactive Systems” builds a foundation for advanced courses in both disciplines. Due to synergy effects, our approach leads to an efficient use of teaching time.