Utilizing Computer Games for Effective AI Education
Many undergraduate AI courses have the learning objective that students are able to precisely define different classes of AI problems and to apply core algorithmic techniques to them. Due to the great breadth of the field of AI, however, introductory AI courses typically include a heterogenous collection of topics and techniques. For this reason, AI courses risk appearing incoherent to students, who can find it challenging to understand how different AI topics relate to each other. We have found that assigning a tightly integrated series of programming projects using a computer game environment has lent unity to our AI course by providing students with a common platform for solving many different kinds of AI problems. In this paper, we introduce a set of useful computer games to use for introductory AI courses. And then we describe our experiences and lessons from utilizing some of them in our AI courses.