Achievement

IGERT-created core-curriculum course "Computational Thinking", an introduction to Computer Science for graduate students, continues to draw a broad audience of students from psychology, computer science and information sciences. Besides teaching basic principles of computer science such as representation, algorithms, complexity, and modularity, it promotes interdisciplinary work through targeted readings and group exercises. The most significant change to the course this year was that we started to require the same final project of all student groups: to program ants as state machines to form ant colonies that compete with and react to each other in a simulated world. This project allowed the course to culminate in the creation of agents that act in a world with uncertainty, a recurring theme in perceptual science. The competitive nature of this group assignment motivated the students to collaborate more intensively and meaningfully than before.