A Multi-Agent Team Formation Framework for Classroom Instruction

Contents

A challenge in AI education is the creation of interesting term projects. An ideal term project is fun, engaging, and allows students to focus on the interesting parts of a problem, rather than spending several weeks designing infrastructure or coming up to speed on a complex simulation framework. In this paper, we describe our efforts in designing a multi-agent team formation environment using the Repast toolkit, which we used successfully for a course project in an upper-level class on intelligent agents. The infrastructure that we developed resulted in a project that was both enjoyable and pedagogically effective, and that could be completed in only a few weeks. We begin with a description of the initial design and deployment of the project, followed by a discussion of problems we encountered, and the changes we have made for future classroom deployments. We conclude with a description of some open issues with our project and how we will address them.