Little Big Data: Shaping Minds for the Cloud

Big Data and Cloud Computing are, beyond a technical revolution, a mental revolution: they change the basic assumptions of computing, and as such the mental habits that are proper of classical computing teaching. For this reason, we think it is essential to help students to change their mental habits as early as possible, and become familiar with at least the basic notions of distributed storage and cloud computing. In this paper we introduce the Little Big Data system, that has been developed with an ambitious task in mind: teach cloud computing basics to K-12 kids, helping them to be part of this revolution. We report on the creation of the system, the challenges, and also the impact on higher K-18 education. The results, tested in the field with a wide variety of kids and children, have been extremely successful, thanks also to advanced educational techniques like gamification, and have also provided valuable insights for the general problem of education of big data computing.