A Service-Learning Approach to Teaching Computer Graphics

Abstract

I taught a computer graphics course through a service-learning framework to undergraduate and graduate students in the spring of 2003 at Florida State University. The students in this course participated in learning a software program along with youths from a neighboring, low-income, primarily African-American community. Together, they learned the Adobe® Photoshop® computer program and collaboratively created a personal collage of images that were meaningful to both the FSU students and the neighborhood youths. Building on the potential for computer graphics to create collaborations among students, service-learning may be a useful strategy to enhance the development of these collaborations by connecting students to the local community to learn from the resources and work with the local residents. In this article, I present this as an example of cooperative imaging as a form of service-learning through the construction of community.