Programming board game strategies in CS2

This workshop presents freshman-level projects based on designing and programming player strategies for well-established board games. Unlike modern computerized games, board games are typically discrete, where the game state can be stored in basic data structures, and a variety of search techniques can be used to evaluate possible player moves. Such board games provide a natural context for many introductory Computer Science topics. The strategy component makes the project open-ended, motivating the students to keep improving their code. After appropriate background information is presented, to better understand how the project works from the students´ perspective, participants will act as students, brainstorm through a variety of data structures, and develop a small part of a player module.