Thursday, May 27, 2021

Othello/Reversi for After the APCS Exam

My good friend and former teaching partner, Tom Indelicato posted about his end of year project for his AP CS A student recently. With his permission I share it with you.

I said goodbye to my seniors today (last day of classes for them). We wrapped up the post-Exam project (I gave them the framework for a Reversi / Othello game, and they wrote an AI for it) by having them play against each other. I put up a randomized tournament bracket, and awarded a $10 Dunks card to the winner.

An incredibly good class of students, they told me that they thought this was the greatest final project ever! I'm gonna miss them.

Tom also generously shared his framework code at https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmXKuaTMPmyCpVBNCyiB0h3t5uWi?e=j9Gv1N

Interestingly, a similar project was in the Nifty Projects session at the CSTA Annual conference in 2018. Unfortunately the GitHub code repository that was associated with it seems to have disappeared. There are other related and useful resources still there at https://sites.google.com/.../roger-jaffe-othello-competition

Most likely Tom's framework would fit along with it with a few minor tweaks.


2 comments:

Brian Sea said...

I do somethimhng similar with my Data Structures class. I have a game framework where they plug in their JS or Java AI and play against each other over the network. ive done Checkers, Connect 4, and Othello.

I plan to rewotk it this summer so that it is more flexible. Hopefully it'll be in a state that i find releasable.

Fritz Sieker said...

How would I contact Tom to get formal permission to use the code as a basis for some exercises for students? Thank you. Fritz Sieker fsieker@colostate.edu