In the morning, we would study a little bit of the physics and math behind image rendering. I didn't have a lot of the content in school, and this is where I learned all the high-school math around matrices and vectors. The instructor truly did an unbelievable job motivating us with this "real" problem we had about understanding the natural world, and then going through exploring how we could marshal the math to make it work.
Then, in the afternoon, we'd turn our attention to the computers, where we would then implement in C the math that we had done in the morning. We all literally started from a "blank sheet of paper," and over the course of a month build our own very simple rendering engine, including all of the helper math functions that it relied on, to a point where it could consume files with vertex information and render a 3D image on the screen. It was... absolutely exhilerating.
I vividly recall our discussion about aliasing, and just how awesome it felt being an "investigator" and thinking deeply about this phenomenon I had noticed while using paint, and now uncovering what to me where insanely clever strategies on how to mitigate it.
I've become an educator, and to this day I hold that as the gold standard for what an incredible educational experience can be. I've tried many times, but if I'm being honest I don't think I've come close to delivering to my kids what that course did for me those years ago. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember the instructor's name, because I wish I could publicly give him a ton of credit for it.