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AI tools present both opportunity and risk for this class. The major opportunity is that you can be more effective coders, even in the relatively short intervals between deliverables. The code/test/debug/integrate bottleneck can be lessened with thoughtful use of AI coding tools. The major risk is that you rely on AI so heavily to solve the problems that you miss out on the central and most fun part of the class, i.e., the creative problem solving. It is acceptable to use AI tools in this class, with the following restrictions.
If AI tools are used for coding, a description of how you used AI to generate the code must be provided in the report. In particular, you must include an appendix in the report titled “AI Prompts” in which you show verbatim all of the prompts you gave to an AI tool to generate code, along with the name and version of the tool you used. So make sure you keep track of the prompts you used!
AI tools can be used for background research without acknowledgment, e.g., “Are there other games like this that have been studied in the academic literature.” While not explicitly prohibited, I do not recommend using AI tools to try to directly solve the problems themselves, or even to suggest directions for further exploration/analysis. The most fun part of the class is coming up with new and clever ideas yourselves, and delegating that to AI would defeat the purpose of the class. If you do use AI to obtain an important insight, it must be mentioned in the acknowledgments section of the report, and the prompts used listed verbatim in the “AI Prompts” appendix of the report.
AI tools can be used (with acknowledgment) to polish your nearly-finished reports. I do not recommend using AI tools to write substantial portions of your reports, because they often fail to capture your intentions during the course of the project, and sometimes generate text that is not ideal. If I observe poor AI-generated text during grading, your report presentation grade will be affected.
We have requested student access to Claude code for this class. More details will be provided later.