HotToPot@aol.com wrote:

If its Game of Life, start them with functioning code and challenge them to extend it in some fairly specific way. ... But don't ask them to face the blank page.

I've prepared something along these lines. I've written a functioning Reversi game that provides a framework for defining new computer player strategies. It's meant as a general programming project and an introduction to AI. There's an accompanying tutorial. See http://erburley.home.netcom.com/Reversi-index.html Reversi is one of the first games I programmed (in high school, in BASIC on an Apple II+). I rewrote this game several times in various languages on various computers as I learned more about programming and AI. Most high school students would probably rather learn to program arcade games and graphics. I think that's fine and I'm interested in making some materials that could be used to that end. However, for the right student, I think AI programming can be a more interesting programming problem since it causes you to think about how humans think, how computers think, how they are related and how they are different. Brent