Using robotics to motivate learning in an ai course for non-majors

This paper describes an undergraduate course in Arti-ficial Intelligence aimed at students who are not Com-puter Science majors. A significant component of the course is a weekly laboratory in which students build and program simple vehicular robots. While the labo-ratory exercises are quite distinct from the topics dis-cussed in class, they serve several important purposes. The lab provides a setting in which students can build confidence; the fun of working with robots motivates students to be more engaged in lecture; and students learn some fundamental programming concepts in ad-dition to material about AI