Topical tapestry: Weaving threads of parallel programming, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence into undergraduate CS courses

Traditionally, topics such as parallel computing, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence have been taught as stand-alone courses in the computing curriculum. Often these are elective courses, limiting the material to the subset of students choosing to take the course. Recently there has been movement to distribute topics across the curriculum in order to ensure that all graduates have been exposed to concepts such as parallel computing. This work describes one approach to threading topics from AI, graphics, and parallel processing into coursework starting early in a student´s program without substantially altering the basic course objectives. This, in turn, allows the student to sample topics early enough to make informed decisions when selecting electives.