Object-Oriented Sokoban Solver: A Serious Game Project for OOAD and AI Education

TL;DR

This paper presents an object-oriented Sokoban solver project as an educational tool for teaching OOAD and AI, providing reusable materials to aid educators and students in game development courses.

Contribution

It introduces a documented game development project with educational resources for OOAD and AI, encouraging sharing of educational game materials.

Findings

Educational materials from the Sokoban project are shared for teaching purposes.

The system design serves as a ready-to-use resource for OOAD education.

The Sokoban solver can be used as an AI assignment platform.

Abstract

Serious games are beneficial for education in various computer science areas. Numerous works have reported the experiences of using games (not only playing but also development) in teaching and learning. Considering it could be difficult for teachers/students to prepare/develop a game from scratch during one semester, assistant educational materials would be crucial in the corresponding courses. Unfortunately, the literature shows that not many materials from educational game projects are shared. To help different educators identify suitable courseware and help students implement game development, it is worth further investigating and accumulating the educational resources from individual game projects. Following such an idea, this paper proposes a game development project of an object-oriented Sokoban solver, and exposes relevant educational materials. The documented system design can be viewed as a ready-to-use resource for education in object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), while the Sokoban solver itself may be used as an assignment platform for teaching artificial intelligence (AI). Further documentation, platform, and APIs will be realized and shared in the future to facilitate others' educational activities. Overall, this work is supposed to inspire and encourage other researchers and educators to post available materials of more game projects for the purpose of sharing and reuse.