Teaching Computer Programming Through Hands-on Labs on Cognitive Computing

In this work we report more recent results of a long- lasting educational project that we have been carrying on for several years and is evolving continuously. The objective of the mentioned project is making students work on the production of small, yet full featured, software prototypes with a collaborative approach, in a dedicated development environment with suited tools and facilities. At the same time, we seek to lay the foundations to build a pragmatic model to teach cognitive computing programming. We conducted such experience in a programming course at the University of Naples “Federico II” exploiting a software development environment based on the Platform as a Service (PaaS). This made possible to perform a set of cooperative learning activities that we used to demonstrate practically some theoretical concepts, also stressing the use of cognitive computing tools, which introduce a new way of thinking the software design process. From its inception, this educational project has involved a relevant number of students, which has been growing continuously, year after year. At our first attempts, students were assigned a specific activity, which was expected to be concluded within one year. Then, as new classes arrived, we have seen that it was possible to start new activities starting from the precedent achievements, thus requiring further evolutions of the available prototypes. This allowed creating more complex and complete projects, as new tools and services were made available, carrying new opportunities. In the present release, such evolutionary path has led to using the IBM Bluemix platform with its wide range of components, including Watson that is devoted to cognitive computing. This work goes in the direction of developing the smart university model, by using innovative and intelligent services to help raising a new generation of software engineers but also to promote and disseminate a new way for designing and building innovative applications.