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How AI Can Help Solve Common Coding Challenges

Published on October 25, 2024 | Posted in  

It feels like every second headline these days is about Artificial Intelligence (AI), ever since Open AI’s chatbot and virtual assistant ChatGPT arrived on the scene in November 2022. Experts in different sectors expect AI to hugely impact and maybe even revolutionize their sector.

Some people think AI will create wonders and usher in the future, today. Others worry that the technology is so powerful, machines will become sentient and bring about some futuristic vision of dystopia. There’s a lot of speculation and some of it is really overheated.

Actually, AI has been with us for some time: RP4K has taught it for years! AI is just software, after all. For more than 24 years, we’ve taught kids how to code by using video games to frame sessions and make classes exciting.

The classic Pac-Man game utilized AI concepts, something we’ve taught since the 90s! Since AI has become more popular, we’ve decided to offer some revamped artificial intelligence courses that demystify machine learning and neural networks.

RP4K is now proud to offer weekly 18-week intermediate and advanced AI courses on weeknights or Saturdays. To get into the AI spirit, let’s check out a few ways that programmers can use the power of AI to help tackle coding challenges.

Streamline Routine Tasks

Sometimes, even experienced coders have mundane matters to work through that end up taking a lot of time. AI can expedite these tasks, saving coders hours or even days of busy work.

There’s a difference between AI being able to think creatively and out-of-the-box about problem-solving tasks and using its power to help with debugging or optimizing algorithms. AI can function like having a reliable assistant to provide suggestions and find problems.

AI can tackle many problems automatically that, if doing by hand, would take much, much longer. Sometimes, the mundane nature of the problems can lead to human error, which isn’t a problem AI has.

Breaking Down the Problems

Using AI to tackle coding problems involves breaking down the underlying processes used daily by programmers. Once the problems are subdivided into smaller units, AI is ready to tackle them.

Coders divide challenges into sub problems all the time, so in a way, this is no different. RP4K helps students understand the nature of coding challenges because our classes have a very small ratio of teachers per student — 4:1. There will be at most three other students and your child in a class, so every student has their teacher’s full attention.

Nobody should have to struggle to be heard or risk slipping through the cracks. Our AI courses are quite advanced, even the intermediate one. Students need all the support we can get, and RP4K provides it, so they can break down coding challenges into their constituent parts.

AI Prompts Require what RP4K Teaches

By the time RP4K students enroll in the intermediate AI course, they will have graduated at least one prior intermediate-level course. Then, they’ll be ready to learn the following programming concepts:

  • Pathfinding
  • State machines and behaviour trees
  • Procedural generation
  • Prompt engineering
  • Introduction to neural networks

Understanding how to get the most from AI means knowing how to feed the best prompts into the ChatGPT chatbot. After all, the chatbot is just the result of software, and what students are really doing is just inputting the right prompt into the software.

Once RP4K students learn these coding concepts, they’ll be better able to navigate AI and they’ll be able to get more from it. AI is such a ubiquitous spreading to so many aspects of life, it’s important that students understand how it really works.

 RP4K students will leave our coding classes for kids program with a real understanding of what AI is, like they’re peeking behind the curtains or looking under the hood.

Better Video Games

RP4K makes learning how to code fun! That’s why we our sessions revolve around teaching kids how to code video games. Our AI program is no different. Students learn how to make really sophisticated details in their games using AI.

For example, pathfinding concepts give them way more control over NPCs (non-player characters) in their games, so they don’t get stuck bumping around in corners. Instead, students can guide characters through dynamic environments, around obstacles, so they look natural and the game plays smoothly.

As the game’s landscape grows more sophisticated, NPCs need to move around more realistically so the game remains immersive. Students learn to use AI to make this possible.

Likewise, behaviour trees is another important concept in AI used to make NPCs more realistic. Consider that people playing video games only control one player; the rest are NPCs! Behaviour trees are part of the underlying foundation for how each background character makes intricate decisions, resulting in a symphony of actions.

Just like coding has if statements, behavioural trees represent a type of fork in the road in decision making, where a given action leads to one path or another, and each resulting decision or “branch” taken together forms a tree. As a result, AI drives the characters to be more life-like in the game.

If you were to play a sophisticated video game and observe how the background characters didn’t only move around but strategize, it may seem like a bafflingly complex coding problem. At the core, there’s a coder harnessing AI to help tackle one problem solving challenge at a time until they create a video game they can show off to friends and really play.

There’s a lot of hype over AI right now, and it’s no surprise: it’s extremely powerful, exciting technology with countless applications. While AI seems exotic and revolutionary, to coders, it’s a familiar technology ramped up for modern life. If you want your kids to be on the cutting edge and use AI effectively, so it helps them and they feel comfortable using it, sign up for RP4K’s new AI classes today. We will show them how AI really works so they can use it for basic coding challenges and, down the road, much more. 

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