Interactive graphics using OpenGL and the Graphix Windowing Toolkit

OpenGL and GLUT are two of the mostly commonly used frameworks employed in teaching interactive computer graphics. GLUT provides the basic tools necessary for creating simple user interactive OpenGL based programs, but it does not provide the user controls and widgets students have come to expect. We present the Graphix Windowing Toolkit as an alternative to the use of GLUT in an introductory computer graphics course. The use of this toolkit, which provides a cross-platform GUI framework with familiar user controls, has expanded the interests and imagination of the students in our introductory graphics course and has resulted in a number of highly successful programming projects.