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Greenfoot, the leading Java development environment for novice programmers, has won a Duke's Choice Award for 2007. The announcement was made at Sun's prestigious JavaOne conference in California. James Gosling, the inventor of Java, presented the award to the development team who are from the University of Kent, UK and from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

The awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology and they are granted to the best and most innovative projects using the Java platform. Winners are selected by James Gosling and the Java technology leadership team.

Greenfoot is a software tool designed to help beginners who are learning to programme using the object-oriented language, Java. Students are able to build real Java programs very quickly and easily by attaching Java objects to graphical elements. These elements can be programmed to interact and form two-dimensional simulations and games. Greenfoot is particularly aimed at high school children.

The team members from Kent, all from the Computing Laboratory, are senior lecturers Dr Michael Kölling and Mr Ian Utting and research associates Ms Cecilia Vargas and Poul Henriksen. The team received a statuette of Duke, the Java technology mascot. They have also been featured on java.com. Greenfoot has attracted a lot of attention throughout the conference with several successful demonstrations and a programming competition taking place inside the Java Playground, a special area set up to demo Java technology-based products and applications.

Michael said:

" We were delighted to receive this award for the Greenfoot project. The University of Kent has worked for quite some time to improve programming teaching both at university and high school level, and to see one of our projects rewarded in this way by the leading Java experts is a great honour. It helps us improving programming teaching in high schools. "

The event took place on 8 May 2007 at the JavaOne conference, San Francisco, California Moscone Center.

Published 9 May 2007
by Maggie Bowman