Leveraging AI ’ s readth in CS 1 Zachary Dodds

Artificial Intelligence offers a compelling backdrop for student assignments and projects even very early in the computer science curriculum. We have leveraged so-called high-level AI, in the form of reasoning about language and game-playing to motivate students in CS 1. More recently we have added activities that might be described as “lower-level” AI: robotics programming via both simulated and real platforms and audio processing and classification. This work presents both student and faculty responses to this experiment and concludes that, with appropriate scaffolding, topics from AI’s full breadth succeed equally as hooks into early CS.