teaching

When teaching alpha-beta pruning in COMSC 334: Artificial Intelligence, I struggled to provide the students with an example that was (1) large enough to be nontrivial, (2) small enough that a walkthrough would not take more than a few minutes, yet (3) not so small that students could mentally solve the minimax problem and sidestep the intended activity.

I leveraged the strengths of the physical medium, creating an interactive worksheet in which a paper flap obscures certain values, simulating the high cost of calculating them. This allows students to walk through the alpha beta pruning algorithm in an environment that closely mimics the information that will be available (and unavailable) to them when writing their alpha-beta pruning method in their Pac-Man project.

Link to the worksheet.