I took night/weekend college classes in CS, often alongside teenagers. For our computer graphics class, one kid was excited, anticipating he was going to find

I took night/weekend college classes in CS, often alongside teenagers. For our computer graphics class, one kid was excited, anticipating he was going to find out how to point and click his way to make a dragon appear in a video game and that sort of thing. In class, we learned things like the Phong reflection model to calculate the illumination of a surface point. Or matrix addition, multiplication and transposition to reorient the points of an object in three dimensional space. Even for myself, we spent a semester learning graph theory, and I had no idea why we were doing so. I understood the next semester as we worked with tree and graph data structures like heaps, DAWGs, Dijkstra's algorithm etc.