Throw Down an AI Challenge

Students will be more likely motivated to pursue a field of study if they encounter relevant, exciting, and interesting challenges early in their studies. The NSF CCLI project “Machine Learning Laboratory Experiences for Introducing Undergraduates to Artificial Intelligence” uses machine learning as a unifying theme to teach diverse artificial intelligence (AI) topics in the context of an introductory AI course. In this paper, we extend our work to include interesting AI challenges suitable for the context of introductory CS1 and CS2 courses.