Teaching Color Science to EECS Students Using Interactive Tutorials: Tools and Lessons

TL;DR

This paper presents a series of interactive tutorials designed to teach color science to EECS students, combining rigorous mathematical explanations with visualization tools to enhance understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel set of interactive tutorials that improve the teaching of color science in EECS curricula through engaging, participatory visualization methods.

Findings

Tutorials enhance student understanding of color concepts

Interactive approach increases engagement and comprehension

Framework can be adapted for other complex scientific topics

Abstract

Teaching color science to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) students is critical to preparing them for advanced topics such as graphics, visualization, imaging, Augmented/Virtual Reality. Color historically receive little attention in EECS curriculum; students find it difficult to grasp basic concepts. This is because today's pedagogical approaches are nonintuitive and lack rigor for teaching color science. We develop a set of interactive tutorials that teach color science to EECS students. Each tutorial is backed up by a mathematically rigorous narrative, but is presented in a form that invites students to participate in developing each concept on their own through visualization tools. This paper describes the tutorial series we developed and discusses the design decisions we made.