Playing around in the CS curriculum: reversi as a teaching tool

The checkerboard game of Reversi has been used successfully to stimulate student enthusiasm in computer science classrooms ranging from CS1 up through Distributed Processing. There is a respectable research literature attesting to its success as a pedagogical tool. This paper briefly describes the game, and then surveys the relevant research literature. It goes on to describe a simple, yet powerful, version of the game built upon a model of human cognition. Finally, the actual use of the game in a tournament setting for a CS2 course is described.