all the students were enthusiastic in developing apps for smart devices; secondly, their activity was monitored thanks to the use of a GitHub which enabled continuous monitoring of the team work in all the phases of the development process, starting from the project proposal. Last but not least, let the students present their work to IT managers belonging to top IT companies further motivated students. Indeed, by examining the project activity of the teams, when they knew of the company involvement their production notably increased. The lecturer and the tutors continuously motivated the students, also providing sug- gestions on the way they had to communicate. The App Challenge was successful because it allowed the best stu- dents to be placed or to increase their familiarity with the work market. For example, a TLC company involved in this competition hosted the winning students for a stage because they demonstrated to be young talent with a strong innovation ability. Many other students were required by the other companies involved in the App Challenge. Overall, all the companies manifested a positive judgment on the competition and on the work the stu- dents did. In fact, many of these companies asked to be informed and involved in future similar initiatives. The reason of this success could be that the adopted learning approach stimulated both intra-team collaboration and extra-team competition. Future work can be directed in the evaluation of the relevance of the combination of these two approaches on learning. As future work, we also plan to fully involve the IT professional managers in the next edition of the MAD course. In particular, we would involve them as the role of coach. Future work will be also devoted to introduce in the next year course cloud platforms for implementing the back-end of the apps for smart devices.