I've always thought about a system for teaching kids about programming by building AI players for online games. The system would consist of 3 components:
1. A screen scraping/computer vision toolkit that would supply most of the AI primitives to interpret games
2. An interpreter for each game that would provide an machine usable API to interact with the game
3. An AI program that would then play the game
Component 1 would only need to be built once, Component 2 would need to be built once per game and then Component 3 is what the kids would get to build.
I always thought this would be an excellent, gentle introduction into the world of programming.
Take Fishy (http://www.xgenstudios.com/game.php?keyword=fishy) for example. It would be really simple to build a dumb AI that could do ok but to build a really great AI would involve some really sophisticated path planning and optimization algorithms.
What better way to get kids inspired and wanting to learn about programming than have them solve the games they're already playing?
1. A screen scraping/computer vision toolkit that would supply most of the AI primitives to interpret games 2. An interpreter for each game that would provide an machine usable API to interact with the game 3. An AI program that would then play the game
Component 1 would only need to be built once, Component 2 would need to be built once per game and then Component 3 is what the kids would get to build.
I always thought this would be an excellent, gentle introduction into the world of programming.
Take Fishy (http://www.xgenstudios.com/game.php?keyword=fishy) for example. It would be really simple to build a dumb AI that could do ok but to build a really great AI would involve some really sophisticated path planning and optimization algorithms.
What better way to get kids inspired and wanting to learn about programming than have them solve the games they're already playing?