Hearts Gym: Learning Reinforcement Learning as a Team Event

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors of this paper organized a Reinforcement Learning (RL) course for a graduate school in the field of data science. We describe the strategy and materials for creating an exciting learning experience despite the ubiquitous Zoom fatigue and evaluate the course qualitatively. The key organizational features are a focus on a competitive hands-on setting in teams, supported by a minimum of lectures providing the essential background on RL. The practical part of the course revolved around Hearts Gym, an RL environment for the card game Hearts that we developed as an entry-level tutorial to RL. Participants were tasked with training agents to explore reward shaping and other RL hyperparameters. For a final evaluation, the agents of the participants competed against each other.