Teaching Computer Programming Through Hands-on Labs on Cognitive Computing

In this work we report the experience of a long-lasting educational project that we have been carrying since a couple of years. In particular, we summarize the results achieved by students in the last year, when they were put to work on the collaborative development of small, yet full featured, software projects. At the same time, based on more recent findings, we seek to lay the foundations to build a pragmatic model to teach cognitive computing programming. The experience was carried on in a Programming course at the Universities of Naples “Federico II” and Genoa, in Italy, and fostered the use of a PaaS (Platform as a Service) environment for a cooperative learning activity, used to disseminate theoretical concepts acquired within the course, also by means of cognitive computing tools. The project, from its inception, has involved a relevant number of students. Initially, the experiment had to be concluded in one year but, instead, has continued evolving with new projects, as new tools and services were made available, carrying new opportunities. The evolution has led, in the most recent release, to using the IBM Bluemix platform with its wide range of components, including Watson. This work goes in the direction of developing the smart university model, by using innovative and intelligent services to help develop a new generation of applications, but also to promote and disseminate a new way for designing and building them.