Escaping the Turing Tar-Pit with AI Programming Blocks

Game design is often considered a motivational approach to get young children interested in programming and computational thinking. However, while the idea of game programming may be compelling from an educational point of view, creating games with interesting interactions that are actually fun to play remains challenging. Modern tools aimed at novice programmers should empower their users to create games, such as Pac-Man, that approach or even exceed the gameplay of 1980's arcade games. By adding a high-level AI pathfinding block to the RULER.game tool, 13 students in grades 1-4 attempted to build Pac-Man-like games. The findings suggest that all students were able to create Pac-Man-like games with compelling gameplay interactions, including ghosts finding the shortest path through complex mazes to Pac-Man, multiple ghosts collaborating with each other, and sophisticated game world topologies featuring toroidal portals.