>The rather brutal CS 248 class at Stanford, for example, requires you (or at least used to) write a 3D game using OpenGL, while the class itself is solely conc

>The rather brutal CS 248 class at Stanford, for example, requires you (or at least used to) write a 3D game using OpenGL, while the class itself is solely concerned with graphics theory, techniques, and algorithms: it doesn't cover OpenGL in the least, and the students are expected to learn it, along with whatever other technologies they need to write the game (input, sound, etc.) on their own. I'm in the "new" 248 right now. We got to reimplement OpenGL in the first two projects (in summary: rasterization, texture mapping/filtering, and point light Phong shading (with per-fragment normals, which I believe is more than OpenGL does)). The third project involves using OpenGL to render a .3ds scene, while implementing bump mapping, shadows, reflection maps, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting. Oh, and we still have to make a nontrivial game for the final project, though we are allowed to use OGRE for it. Point is, it's a lot of programming.