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BlueJ, the widely-used educational programming environment developed and maintained at the School of Computing at the University of Kent, this week celebrated its 10th birthday.

First released in 1999, BlueJ changed significantly how programming could be taught to beginners. Michael Kölling, lead designer in the BlueJ project, said:

" We started developing BlueJ because there was just no environment available at the time that allowed us to teach the way we wanted to teach. We developed our own method, and it turns out that many other instructors followed our path. "

Adoptions of BlueJ have grown significantly over the ten years. BlueJ is now being downloaded more than a million times every year, and is being used by more than 1,000 different institutions worldwide. Michael said:

" It is amazing to see that use of BlueJ is still growing every year. That makes it very satisfying for us to work on the project. It is a good result when a research project survives this long and makes a real change outside of a lab. "

BlueJ is a free, open source project, in development jointly with La Trobe University in Australia, and supported by Sun Microsystems. It is available for download from www.bluej.org.

Published 2 September 2009
Contact: M.L.Bowman@kent.ac.uk