Australian STEM Videogame Challenge Canceled Due To AI (pcgamer.com) 22
PC Gamer reports:
The Australian STEM Videogame Challenge, a "free national videogame development competition for students," has confirmed that the rise of generative AI means this year's event will be the last...
Speculation as to the cause of the program's cancellation focused primarily on the presence of AI in entries: Another self-proclaimed judge said the problem wasn't merely the use of AI in itself but that "some students just completely generate their games with AI...."
[T]he Australian Council for Educational Research has confirmed that the cancellation was in fact due to AI.... "making it harder to judge what students made themselves, and moving the program away from its original purpose."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader neoRUR for sharing the news.
[T]he Australian Council for Educational Research has confirmed that the cancellation was in fact due to AI.... "making it harder to judge what students made themselves, and moving the program away from its original purpose."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader neoRUR for sharing the news.
What we made ourselves .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: What we made ourselves .... (Score:3)
Re: What we made ourselves .... (Score:2)
Is coding by hand a valuable skill?
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It is about the journey not the destination. The point of the competition was to teach valuable skills that the kids would have picked up while making the game
Using AI effectively is *without a question* a valuable skill for a developer to pick up nowadays.
IMHO manual coding also still is, but I wonder for how long. There is no question in my mind manual coding is going the way of the Dodo, the only question is how fast.
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Both are valuable and knowing how to code by hand helps massively while doing it with help of AI.
That currently poses a problem: How to get someone to voluntary do it "the hard way" when the perfect solution of the tutorial exercises is one prompt away?
A bit later we get the question: If nobody learned anymore to understand the (now) low-level code, who will review it, correct it, teach AI new knowledge? And that's the interesting part, if we will eventually have AIs evaluate AI code and create programming
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Exactly. Maybe a better comparison for AI would be if you just paid someone in India to make the game from your spec for you. It will cost more than AI tokens but you absolutely could do it. I think most people would understand that isn't in the spirit of the competition.
It's happening everywhere now. A lot of communities are being flooded with AI apps now, e.g. Home Assistant has an endless stream of "I made this cool new dashboard" and it's actually just what AI shat out in an afternoon. Don't get me wron
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Exactly. If they want to make this competition more representative of what they may encounter in the real world, they could add restrictions to AI budgets. What can you make with $1000 in AI credits? That seems like part of the real challenge for future developers.
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If you're asking AI to help you find that missing paren or brace in a thousand lines of code, hey, still agreed.
If you're asking AI "Make an anime themed roguelike in Godot. It should have the following..." - I don't care how much elaborate world-building you do after those ellipses, "you" aren't making anything.
Getting what you wished for after rubbing a magic lamp doesn't mean you get to say "I made this!"
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If you're asking AI "Make an anime themed roguelike in Godot. It should have the following..." - I don't care how much elaborate world-building you do after those ellipses, "you" aren't making anything.
Well, let's say that you "code" the game the traditional way. You are still using Godot, which you likely did not make yourself... Can you really say "I made this"? Furthermore, let's say you liked Breath of the Wild a lot and decide to base your game on it, but create your own characters, story etc... can you say "I made this"?
Even with traditional coding and before AI we often stood on a mountain of existing work that made our job much easier if not at all possible comparing from making it from scratch fr
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Who cares about the selfish "Did YOU make it" claims? I did something and afterward something useful exists. I am happy. I do not care about if you think I typed enough keywords or not, because I didn't do it to make you proud, but to have a nice result. So if you want to keep screaming into the void, the rest of us is having fun and creating stuff.
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I think they have missed the point. Ai "is" making it ourselves.
hahahahahhahahahahahah no.
It absolutely is not making it yourself. If it were, you'd be able to get a copyright on your slop.
I enjoy being able to get stuff made by AI, but I'm not doing it. I'm guiding the process, but it is fundamentally not my work.
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Also, some people have access to better AI agents than others. A truly fair competition gives everyone the same opportunity to succeed. You know, a level playing field.
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Why penalize? Because the point of the event was learning to code. I'm sure there are very well-funded AI-prompting contests, if they want to compete in that arena.
Unless they go into their own category, it's "girls in boy's sports" or "boys in girl's sports" or whatever it is people are mad about these days.
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It depends on what your premise is. If you use a chess program at a standard chess tournament you're cheating. Still there are events where humans play against chess programs and that's the main point of the event. And there are people who are not competitive but just want to play and both play with other humans and with chess programs. It's nice to play with your neighbor, but if you are letting them win half the time because they are not on your level, you probably sit down later at the PC and play a good
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I think they have missed the point. Ai "is" making it ourselves. Some people will be better at using AI to express their ideas, Why penalize them with the mechanics of coding.
Because it's a STEM competition, not an arts college graphics contest. "Vibes" are not part of STEM. The Entire point of the challenge is to display skill.
In other news I'm sure I could beat you at cycling. Let's have a challenge. Me vs you. And when I instead pay some money to have Tadej Pogaar cycle on my behalf just don't complain when I said that "I" was the better cyclist. After all why penalize me in a cycling contest with the requirement of fitness.
Nintendo e shop/eslop (Score:2)
The Nintendo e shop is filled with vibe coded games made with premade digital assets. https://youtu.be/8nRo9nxq1TI?s... [youtu.be]
Challenges come, challenges go (Score:2)
The next event will be organized by people who don't mind if AI is used or not.
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Who will review code in the future? (Score:2)
It is also trivial to know if they have used AI... pick some random code blocks, ask them what they do and why they did it that way.
No Biggie (Score:2)