ACM Teaching Materials for Computing

These two team-based classroom activities are designed to help students understand key concepts used in artificial intelligence (AI) to search for possible solutions to problems. These activities are designed for use in Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), where student teams work during class time with active facilitation by an instructor or TA.

After completing these activities, students should be able to:

•Define and give examples of key terms, including: action, state, initial state, goal state, goal test, transition function, path, path cost function, state space

•Define and identify goal state problems and goal path problems.

•Describe the general structure of search problems, and specific strategies, including: breadth-first, depth-first, depth-limited, random-first, bi-directional, best-first

•Describe uninformed and informed search.

•Describe the value of path cost and heuristic functions.