I took Ken Perlin's undergraduate graphics course in 2002 or 2003. Back then, Java was the only way to execute code in a browser that did something useful in a

I took Ken Perlin's undergraduate graphics course in 2002 or 2003. Back then, Java was the only way to execute code in a browser that did something useful in a reasonable amount of time. More than anything, it enabled a pretty unique pedagogical experience. Every week we'd have to make something which related to that week's topic (diffuse/specular shading, geometry manipulation, inverse kinematics, z-buffers, etc). There were no other content restrictions. To "submit" our assignment, we'd have to publish the java applet on our personal page. Ken would go student by student and open up the week's projects on the projector, then play around with it a little. If you pulled off something cool, you'd talk about how you did it. If you didn't master the thing (happened to everyone at least once), you'd talk about what was broken, and other people would chime in to help you figure out what was wrong. It was fun either way — detective work without looking at the source. Most importantly, the whole atmosphere was super-collegial. I learned a ton and it felt like the right way to teach computer science — build things, critique, rinse and repeat. I didn't get much sleep that semester ("WHY THE HELL WON'T THIS RENDER!!!111!!!one" was a common refrain in chat with my coursemates) but it was the best class I ever took. Plus, Ken drives vim like a fucking boss. Like, he'd enter some arcane vim incantation ":ad8723bsd9asasfd" and bam, a ray tracer appeared in his buffer.