Engaging Computing Students with AI and Robotics.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a new curriculum for a CS1 course that uses personal robots as a context for learning introductory computer science. Students learn several computing and AI-related concepts in the process of exploring and designing robot behaviors. We believe that the use of personal robots and engaging examples can provide a good foundation for learning computing and hence serve to attract a more diverse body of students into the computing disciplines. In this paper, we describe how we have embedded numerous AI concepts in the design of our curriculum.