py.CGAL.visual
Robust Geometric Computations and Visualization (for ordinary mortals)
  The above images were made using the 3d object loader implemented
by Mihalis Nikolaou. |
Welcome to the home page of the py.CGAL.visual
project! In these pages we will try to summarize the
experience gained through teaching a Computational Geometry
course during the 2007 Fall semester, in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications
at University of Athens.
One of the course's primary goals was to motivate students to implement the algorithms taught in class and experiment with various inputs in order to gain better insight and experience. The use of the CGAL library was mandatory although previous experience proved that C++ programming was an overkill especially for the theoretically inclined students. Luckily enough, a sub-project of CGAL, the CGAL-Python bindings, seemed a lot promising, so we decided to experiment and try to use Python along with the CGAL-Python bindings. The result rewarded us far more than we expected: students were more comfortable and less anxious with implementations as the use of Python is a more natural and high level way to implement an algorithm when you don't care for the low level details. Even the theoretically inclined ones chose as a final project to program instead of present papers in class. Please fell free to browse the project's pages and in case you have any comments or suggestions drop us an email. All the images in the project's pages were obtained by the output of software developed in class (and a little post processing). |