Effects of Game Tournaments on Learning and Classroom Climate.

In this paper, we motivate and describe a term long game tournament. The tournament has different milestones, including breadth-first search, heuristic search, knowledge representation and reasoning and the tournament proper. For this last milestone, students are encouraged to use machine learning techniques. We describe in detail each of the milestones as well as the game and its specifications. We discuss concerns related to competitiveness and classroom climate as well as ways in which we addressed them. We present and evaluate data gathered about the competitive nature of our students as well as their learning experience with the tournament.