Board Game Students Challenge

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Each year, since 2014, as part of the course of Foundaments of Artificial Intelligence M, groups of students are invited to design a little prototype of an Artificial Intelligence able to play board games

Benchmarks

2019: Tablut
2015-2018: Nine Men's Morris. Information regarding this challenge are available in the specific page.
2014: a part of Nine Men's Morris (first phase)

Results

This experience has led to:

New knowledge acquisition: autonomous study of AI techniques not taught during the course (Genetic Algorithms, Neuroevolution, Negamax, NegaScout, BNS)
Knowledge consolidation and motivation improvement: students declare themselves as more motivated by the challenge, and that it has helped them to learn the course concepts
Course exam performance improvement: at average, better final marks and smaller percentage of exam failure

Papers

The results of the research conducted from 2015 to 2017 have been presented at the XVIth International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence:

Link to the published article: A Game-Based Competition as Instrument for Teaching Artificial Intelligence (Springer website)
Link to the pre-publish version of the article and to the article poster (bottom of the page): A Game-Based Competition as Instrument for Teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI@Unibo website)