October 2008 — Open Source
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BlueJ or Bust!
Can a learning environment that simplifies the teaching of programming skills help restore America's dwindling population of computer scientists?
A JONES FOR JAVA
Kölling's creation has
eased the understanding
of
basic programming for
beginning high school
computer science students.
"COMPUTING, IN HIGH SCHOOL, is perceived as a very boring, nerdy activity," Michael Kölling says. "Before a computing teacher even begins speaking, three-quarters of his students have already decided they're not interested."
That knee-jerk disinterest has translated into a developing shortage of software experts in the US, a trend that Kölling, a computer science professor at the University of Kent in the UK, is working to reverse through his creation of the BlueJ open source programming environment.
High school computer science earned its bad reputation by being a notoriously difficult subject in which programming even the simplest of games requires knowledge and steps so technical, abstract, and time-consuming that the work often leads to frustration for even seasoned professionals. With BlueJ, Kölling has essentially developed a set of training wheels for novice programmers that allows them to see the fun, creative side of programming without getting worn down by impenetrable terminology and beginners' mistakes.
Developed by Kölling in 1999 as part of a research project at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where he was a lecturer, BlueJ provides a visually based, object-oriented programming environment that enables beginning students to create projects without delving into the more intricate areas such as syntax and classes that are typically problematic for anyone learning Java. Java, an open source programming language created in 1995 by Sun Microsystems, has become the standard programming language for the College Board's advanced placement computer science curriculum and for most college-level introductory computer science courses. Kölling originally developed BlueJ for first-year computer science students in higher education, marketing his creation at computer education conferences.
Word trickled down to high school computer science educators and many signed on without hesitation. It was then that Kölling realized the magnitude of the hole that BlueJ filled in the market. "Teaching object orientation was seen as a very difficult problem," he says. "People were really looking for a solution."
