Bob Futrelle's Teaching

I realized that in my AI courses that students focused their projects on the material they learned about early in the course. But some of them discovered that topics introduced later in the course were more interesting to them as a project, but unfortunately, they hadn't known about them.

So in the Spring of 2007, I spent nearly two weeks presenting an overview of almost every topic in our textbook, Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach ("AIMA") 2nd edition, by Russell and Norvig. This worked well and the students appreciated it as they looked back on it at the end of the course. It did indeed allow some students to work on topics that were not going to be covered early on such as uncertainty, learning, and language.

There were brief readings from each chapter, described (for the undergraduate course too) on this page.

The only mistake I made was to try to give short quizzes on the overview. That didn't work. The book is a nearly 1,000 pages long and the students could not absorb enough from the whirlwind presentation to allow them to answer questions on a quiz.

I was a bit blindsided when this problem arose in my Database Design class this Fall, and quickly moved to fix the problem before it was too late. I realized that their projects were headed toward building fancy systems on a weak base of database concepts, rather than simple systems built on rich and important database concepts.