Programming board game strategies in CS2
James E. Heliotis, Ivona Bezáková, Sean P. Strout · 2013
This workshop presents freshman-level projects based on designing and programming player strategies for well-established board games. Unlike modern computerized games, board games are typically discrete, where the game state can be stored in basic data structures, and a variety of search techniques can be used to evaluate possible player moves. Such board games provide a natural context for many introductory Computer Science topics. The strategy component makes the project open-ended, motivating the students to keep improving their code. After appropriate background information is presented, to better understand how the project works from the students' perspective, participants will act as students, brainstorm through a variety of data structures, and develop a small part of a player module.