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Lesson 5 - Artificial Intelligence - Teacher’s Guide
http://www.stencyl.com/teach/act5/

Overview
Introduce students to the basics of artificial intelligence (AI) within the context of games.

Outcome
Students will take what they’ve learned and write some simple AI to control non
player-controlled characters.

Lesson Plan (1 - 2 hours)
Discussion

15 minutes

Cover the topics under Discussion Notes (Page 2 - End)
Present the topics. Pose questions at appropriate points and encourage
students to participate in the discussion.

Activity

Write AI’s for a Game
Students will apply what they’ve just learned to write some AI’s for an
existing game.

Activity

Work on extra activities
Students will work on a more challenging set of activities in order to
demonstrate mastery of the concepts they’ve learned.

45 minutes

60 minutes

Note: Extra activities are optional but recommended.

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 1

Discussion Notes
Topic 1: What is Artificial Intelligence?
In contrast to prior lessons, the teacher will play more a moderator role in guiding a class
discussion. There’s very little to lecture about here.
Discussion Idea: Before talking, have students come up with their working definition of what artificial
intelligence is.
Cite real-life examples, whether from games or not. (Voice Recognition / Siri, Google Search, self-driving
vehicles, …)

In academic terms, Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is the ability for computers to act
intelligently. More practically, AI lets a program make decisions based on what it knows
in order to meet its goals.
In a board game where the rules are well-defined, the goal could be to get the highest
score or defeat the opponent. In a more open-ended game, the goal could simply be to
survive the longest.
For simple games like the ones we’re building, we’re mostly concerned with creating AI’s
that fulfill the roles that these actors are playing. They needn’t be “intelligent” but merely
acting out the way they’re expected.
Discussion Ideas: Have students come up with examples of AI from games they’ve played. Be sure that
they dissect the behaviors in specifics, rather than generalities.
After this, have students talk about what makes an AI convincingly real, again, citing both good and bad
examples of this.

Topic 2: State Machines
Recommendation: Hold off on this topic until students have reached Step 5 in the activity.

For some actors, these actors follow a simple AI that does the same thing all the time. For
example, “seeking” missile will continually follow its target until it reaches it.
For more complex behaviors, this won’t work. For example, boss characters usually switch
between various modes of attack (or evasion) to keep boss battles challenging and varied.
Discussion Idea: Take a boss from a game of your (or your students’) choice and dissect its behavior.
If you don’t have one in mind, take this classic example of Bowser from Super Mario Bros.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQ2TPu1aVw&feature=youtu.be&t=1m48s
Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 2

Bowser switches between sliding around on the ground, spitting fire, jumping and throwing hammers.

To do this, we use what’s called a State Machine.

State Machines consist of various states and connections between these states. Within a
state, an actor will act a certain way (and sometimes look a certain way). Switching
between states happens when certain conditions that you specify are met.
TODO: Replace this with something game-oriented in the future.

In the example above (which represents a turnstile in an amusement park or subway), the
state machine consists of 2 states.
● Locked
● Unlocked
The turnstile starts in the Locked state. Two actions are available for exiting this state you can…
● Push the turnstile
● Insert a Coin
Pushing, predictably gets you nowhere because you need to pay. Inserting a coin will
unlock the turnstile, thereby transitioning it to the Unlocked state.
Tip: If necessary, for completeness, repeat this analysis on the Unlocked state.

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 3

Topic 3: State Machines = Animations in Stencyl
How does this apply to Stencyl and game making?
In Stencyl, state machines exist as “Animation (States)” for Actors.
Aside: In MIT Scratch, they are called Costumes.

Animations are specified on an Actor’s Appearance page. Each Animation corresponds to a
state.

In the example above, the Hero has 4 states - Up, Down, Left and Right that correspond
with the direction he’s facing.
Switching animations is done using the following block under Actor > Draw.

The current animation is retrieved using the following block, on the same page.

Putting this all together, one could do the following to have the code react differently
Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 4

depending on what state the Hero was in.

Stencyl Educator’s Kit ­ Lesson 5 ­ 5
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