Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, achieved fame through the popularization of his theory of "Multiple Intelligences". According to Gardner, there are eight different types of intelligence (with intelligence defined as "the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural setting").
Alan Turing was one of the forerunners of Computer Science. In a paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", he proposed that computers had the potential to be as intelligent and "human" as humans are. Moreover, he designed an "Imitation Game" (now known as the Turing Test) to tell whether a computer had achieved intelligence. In this "imitation game", a person must distinguish between two entities (one a computer, and the other a human) communicating with him from another room. If the player cannot determine which is the computer with an accuracy better than random guessing, then the computer has passed the test and is "intelligent".
John McCarthy was a professor of Computer Science. Among his many accomplishments was the invention of the programming language LISP (short for List Processing). LISP was not designed to be implemented in machine code -- it was a theoretical construct, showing one of the simplest possible ways that one could build a turing complete language for algorithms. However, it was later found that LISP could be implemented in machine code. It was commonly used in the AI research community for a long time.
We worked on a project to make an AI that would have a conversation with a user. We used python's random module to have the chatbot pick a random response from a list. We also used the "in" command in python to have the chatbot respond to different input differently. For example, if the program senses the word "stupid" in the user's input, it will respond "saying that something is stupid is silly". We also used a loop to make the chatbot continue to respond to user questions or stop responding to user questions, depending on user input.
Here is the code for my chatbot.
Here is a picture of my chatbot chatting. 
Tuesday morning, we made a pair of functions that which ask the user if he or she would like to play again, and then ends the program if the user answers no. We thought that these would be useful in many of the projects we're working on this year, and so we learned how to import functions from one python module into another python module.
Tuesday afternoon, we did an actual turing test with our chatbots. A student would leave the room, and the rest of the class would ask him/her questions in an attempt to divine whether the entity answering was the student's chatbot or the student him/her self. The class guessed wrong 3 out of 5 times, so overall, the students selected did a good job.
On wednesday, we used the wolfram alpha API to create a factbot. It asks the user if he or she has a question, queries wolfram alpha with the input , and then prints the answer the wolfram alpha sends back. After that, it asks if the user has another question -- if the user says yes, it asks for more input, and if the user says no, the program stops.
Here is a picture of the code for the factbot. 
Here is a picture of the factbot working. 
We also made the factbot speak, and write its questions and answers to a text file. Here is a picture of the code we used. 
