Presentación en Curicó enero 2009

1. The Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly
Experiences with Active
Learning in Artificial
Intelligence
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2. The Module: Artificial
Intelligence
The study of algorithms
that do intelligent things.
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3. The Old Course
• Evaluated through two tests, two
small projects and one largish
project
• Very little practical experience with
the algorithms and programming
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4. The New Course
One large semester long
programming project
broken into 5 parts, done
by groups of three or less.
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5. The Product
An agent capable of
playing a game of Chess
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6. The Goal
To win a tournament at the
end of the course.
The winning group
receives 1 extra point on
their final grade.
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7. Development Plan
• 5 smaller projects
1)Design of the board (rules, data model)
2)Algorithms for searching
3)Logic (define rules logical, redesign
board)
4)Learning
5)Complete Agent, Presentation, Report
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8. Special Rules
• After the submittal of any one project,
students can use the work of another
group in their next projects (With proper
documentation)
• Students evaluate the work of other
groups. This evaluation forms part of the
groups grade for their project. The
evaluation counts as part of the student's
grade for participation.
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9. Teaching Goals
• More experience with programming,
working in groups, reading and
evaluating code
• Learning the techniques of AI through
hands on experience
• Give the students a goal and
motivation to learn and explore
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10. Other notes
• Each subproject designed to be more
than what is needed for the next
subproject. Students must decide
what should go, what should stay.
• Project definitions have a certain
amount of ambiguity (to encourage
students to gather software
requirements)
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11. The Good:
• Some very motivated groups, reading and
investigating methods to improve their
agents.
• Student evaluations more or less reflect
the teacher's grades
• Some changes of attitudes throughout the
term
• Better programming by the end of term.
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12. The Bad
• Low performance ­ Only two of the projects were
able to win against a random agent
• Not much reuse of code ­ students complained it
was too hard to understand the code of others
• Students unable to analogize from the work of
others
• Students unable to move ideas from theory to
code
• Much more time required by professor
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13. More of The Bad
• Unequal work by students within groups
• Students lost sight of Artificial Intelligence
aspects of course, focused more on
Programming
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14. The Ugly
• Students expected pautas for the evaluation of
other projects
• No group was able to complete project 1
successfully. This delayed all further projects
and caused much stress for the students and
delayed their progress on the following projects.
• Complaints of unclear/changing specifications
for the projects
• High expectations of students by the professor
not matched by reality
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15. The lessons
• Set aside time for group meetings
• Have a backup plan
• Let the students make mistakes (but
not too many)
• Discuss group projects in class
• Relate theory to code
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16. The take home message
Was it worth it?
Yes
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