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Lesson 5 - Artificial Intelligence - Teacher's Guide: Cover The Topics Under Discussion Notes (Page 2 - End)

This document provides guidance for a lesson on introducing students to artificial intelligence in games. It includes an overview, intended outcomes, and a lesson plan structured around a discussion on AI topics and related activities for students to apply what they've learned. The discussion notes cover definitions of AI, examples of AI behaviors in games, and how state machines can be used to model more complex behaviors by breaking them into a series of states that actors can transition between based on conditions. It relates these concepts back to how state machines map to animations in the Stencyl game engine.

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Erick Velez
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62 views

Lesson 5 - Artificial Intelligence - Teacher's Guide: Cover The Topics Under Discussion Notes (Page 2 - End)

This document provides guidance for a lesson on introducing students to artificial intelligence in games. It includes an overview, intended outcomes, and a lesson plan structured around a discussion on AI topics and related activities for students to apply what they've learned. The discussion notes cover definitions of AI, examples of AI behaviors in games, and how state machines can be used to model more complex behaviors by breaking them into a series of states that actors can transition between based on conditions. It relates these concepts back to how state machines map to animations in the Stencyl game engine.

Uploaded by

Erick Velez
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lesson 5 - Artificial Intelligence - Teacher’s Guide

http://www.stencyl.com/teach/act5/

Overview

Introduce students to the basics of artificial intelligence (AI) within the context of games.

Outcome

Students will take what they’ve learned and write some simple AI to control non
player-controlled characters.

Lesson Plan (1 - 2 hours)

Discussion Cover the topics under Discussion Notes (Page 2 - End)


15 minutes Present the topics. Pose questions at appropriate points and encourage
students to participate in the discussion.

Activity Write AI’s for a Game


45 minutes Students will apply what they’ve just learned to write some AI’s for an
existing game.

Activity Work on extra activities


60 minutes Students will work on a more challenging set of activities in order to
demonstrate mastery of the concepts they’ve learned.

Note: Extra activities are optional but recommended.

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 1 
 
Discussion Notes

Topic 1: What is Artificial Intelligence?

In contrast to prior lessons, the teacher will play more a moderator role in guiding a class
discussion. There’s very little to lecture about here.

Discussion Idea: Before talking, have students come up with their working definition of what artificial
intelligence is.

Cite real-life examples, whether from games or not. (Voice Recognition / Siri, Google Search, self-driving
vehicles, …)

In academic terms, Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is the ability for computers to act
intelligently. More practically, AI lets a program make decisions based on what it knows
in order to meet its goals.

In a board game where the rules are well-defined, the goal could be to get the highest
score or defeat the opponent. In a more open-ended game, the goal could simply be to
survive the longest.

For simple games like the ones we’re building, we’re mostly concerned with creating AI’s
that fulfill the roles that these actors are playing. They needn’t be “intelligent” but merely
acting out the way they’re expected.

Discussion Ideas: Have students come up with examples of AI from games they’ve played. Be sure that
they dissect the behaviors in specifics, rather than generalities.

After this, have students talk about what makes an AI convincingly real, again, citing both good and bad
examples of this.

Topic 2: State Machines

Recommendation: Hold off on this topic until students have reached Step 5 in the activity.

For some actors, these actors follow a simple AI that does the same thing all the time. For
example, “seeking” missile will continually follow its target until it reaches it.

For more complex behaviors, this won’t work. For example, boss characters usually switch
between various modes of attack (or evasion) to keep boss battles challenging and varied.

Discussion Idea: Take a boss from a game of your (or your students’) choice and dissect its behavior.

If you don’t have one in mind, take this classic example of Bowser from Super Mario Bros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQ2TPu1aVw&feature=youtu.be&t=1m48s

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 2 
 
Bowser switches between sliding around on the ground, spitting fire, jumping and throwing hammers.

To do this, we use what’s called a State Machine.

State Machines consist of various states and connections between these states. Within a
state, an actor will act a certain way (and sometimes look a certain way). Switching
between states happens when certain conditions that you specify are met.

TODO: Replace this with something game-oriented in the future.

In the example above (which represents a turnstile in an amusement park or subway), the
state machine consists of 2 states.

● Locked
● Unlocked

The turnstile starts in the Locked state. Two actions are available for exiting this state -
you can…

● Push the turnstile


● Insert a Coin

Pushing, predictably gets you nowhere because you need to pay. Inserting a coin will
unlock the turnstile, thereby transitioning it to the Unlocked state.

Tip: If necessary, for completeness, repeat this analysis on the Unlocked state.

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 3 
 
Topic 3: State Machines = Animations in Stencyl

How does this apply to Stencyl and game making?

In Stencyl, state machines exist as “Animation (States)” for Actors.

Aside: In MIT Scratch, they are called Costumes.

Animations are specified on an Actor’s Appearance page. Each Animation corresponds to a


state.

In the example above, the Hero has 4 states - Up, Down, Left and Right that correspond
with the direction he’s facing.

Switching animations is done using the following block under Actor > Draw.

The current animation is retrieved using the following block, on the same page.

Putting this all together, one could do the following to have the code react differently
Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 4 
 
depending on what state the Hero was in.

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 5 
 

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