Box Plot

In my graphics course, students complete an assignment called Boxels. Their application must read in a file that describes a sculpture composed only of boxes. Each line describes the position, dimensions, and color of a single box and has this form:

x y z width height depth r g b

x y z width height depth r g b

Students must design two sculptures of their own. I see a lot of snowmen and Minecraft creepers. Some students flex their creative muscle, like the one who modeled a toilet complete with a floating deposit.

This semester a student decided to use his Boxels renderer to make an interactive graph explorer for a final presentation in a non-computer science course. The student wrote a script to translate his data on automobiles into a file of box descriptions. Here's a shot of the viewer looking at several of the graphs:

This is exactly the sort of undertaking that I hope to inspire with all my assignments. Only this time it worked.