Curriculum descant: How much programming? What kind?

D esigning programming assignments for an artificial intelligence (AI) course presents several challenges. How much programming should there be in an AI course? What kinds of programming assignments should one design? What programming languages or platforms would one use? Are the students sufficiently prepared? For anyone looking for answers in this column, here is the punch line: It depends. It depends on the kind of course you are planning, where it fits in your curriculum, what students expect of your course, and what the rest of your department perceives the course to be. I will attempt to highlight some of the major concerns here that will hopefully bring some awareness to these important pedagogical issues the next time you plan your course. The amount of programming included in the course depends on the level and the department where it is offered. An introductory AI course may have no programming component at all. At the other end of the spectrum, it can be offered as a course with a heavy programming component. If the course is offered outside a computer science program, it is unlikely to have any computer programming. However, even in a course offered in a computer science program , the amount of programming required of students varies. In most cases, you might encounter anywhere from two to eight assignments in an AI course, not all of which might involve programming. This leads to the next question: What kinds of programming assignments should you design? In thinking about the kinds of programming assignments you have several choices, some of which depend on your own pedagog-ical objectives. The dividing line here lies between a choice of implementing " tools " versus implementing " applications. " For some instructors it is important to expose their students to the specialized algorithms embedded inside most AI tools—for example, learning and implementing pattern matching and unification, modeling a back-propagation neural network, and implementing a natural language parser of a specific kind. Some AI instructors like to use the programming exercises as a vehicle for teaching complex programming techniques. Exercises mentioned earlier serve that purpose well. Algorithms embedded in tools tend to be quite complex and are a good way of improving students' programming skills. In exercises that involve implementing complete applications, the amount of programming can also vary. Sometimes, in implementing game playing programs, for example, implementation involves a fair amount of programming. In …