Authoring the "Intelligence" of an Educational Game

In this paper, we describe a frame-based production rules system that works as the Artificial Intelligence Engine of an educational computer game. We discuss the need of an authoring environment clearly separated by the game in order to allow a technical staff without any skills in either AI or Computer Science to encode the “intelligence” of the game. Finally, we briefly introduce two graphical interface for authoring and testing frame hierarchies and production rules. The production rule systems and the authoring tools have been developed in the context of a project funded by the European Community to develop a prototypical educational computer game.