A game that helps students better understand the core of programming thinking

Project Background

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) will profoundly change human society and life and change the world. In order to To seize the major strategic opportunity for the development of AI, to build China’s first-mover advantage in the development of AI, to accelerate the construction of an innovative nation and global power in science and technology, The State Council of PRC published "A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan"[1].

In this plan, the State Council pointed out 6 guarantee measures, aiming at the realistic requirements of promoting the healthy and rapid development of AI in China. One of the measures is to carry out a wide range of AI scientific activities. It mentioned setting up AI-related courses in primary and secondary schools, and gradually promote programming education to encourage social forces to participate in the promotion and development of educational programming software and games.

In the response to the plan of the State Council, we designed Ifcreate Course, a series of educational games and interactive coursewares, which will help the primary and secondary school students in learning AI and forming their cognition of AI, by introducing some basic concept, offering some interesting programming practice and a more interactive class environment. Agent Robi is one of the educational games in Ifcreate Course, that helps secondary students better understand programming thinking.

Design & Development

The design of this game is greatly affected by Stimulus-Response Theory (S-R Theory)[2], first established by John B. Watson, is central to the principles of conditioning. In this project, we think of the game as a stimulus, and we want our target users (secondary school students) could be familiar with programming thinking through playing this game. So, Our ideal response for this stimulus is students can better understand the core of programming thinking, then make them much easier to learn programming in the class.

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Game Instructions

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Development

The game is developed on Unity 3D, and we were coding on Visual Studio. We created a 3D scene and finished all the scripts to realize it.

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The video below show Robi's action according to the correct instructions.

The video below show Robi's action according to the correct instructions. The player didn't add the sensor of bug detection, so Robi lost 1 life. Besides, the user arrange the sequence of instructions incorrectly. He put the senor of treasure after the sensor of "not face the border", so Robi passed the treasure instead of opening it(treasure is not an obstacle).

Reference

[1] A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (English version)

[1] A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (Chinese official version)

[2] A short introduction about Stimulus-Response Theory and Conditioning