Integrating games and machine learning in the undergraduate computer science classroom

Abstract

A student will be more likely motivated to pursue a field of study if they encounter relevant and interesting challenges early in their studies. The authors are PIs on two NSF funded course curriculum development projects (CCLI). Each project seeks to provide compelling curricular modules for use in the Computer Science classroom starting as soon as CS 1. In this paper, we describe one curriculum module which is the synergistic result of these two projects. This module provides a series of challenges for undergraduate students by using a game environment to teach machine learning and classic Artificial Intelligence concepts.