Development of an Artificial Intelligence Programming Course and Unity3d Based Framework to Motivate Learning in Artistic Minded Students

The paper aims at one of the problems many of the new multidisciplinary engineering educations encountered when teaching technical topics to students who are neither technically skilled nor aspired to learn these. The research continues and extends a study that has been done over a period of five years and tested on over 400 students at the bachelor part of the relatively new multidisciplinary engineering education Medialogy at Aalborg University Copenhagen. The author successfully found a number of pedagogical approaches for teaching technical topics to the challenging diverse students. The gap between technical and artistic minded students is, however, increased once the students reach the sixth semester. The complex algorithms of the artificial intelligence course seemed to demotivate the artistic minded students even before the course began. This paper will present the extensive changes made to the sixth semester artificial intelligence programming course, in order to provide a highly motivating direct visual feedback, and thereby remove the steep initial learning curve for artistic minded students. The framework was developed with close dialog to both the game industry and experienced master students, so the contend directly links to the demands of the students future challenges.