The Programming Education Tools groups in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, led by Professor Michael Kölling, has received a research and development grant of US $510,000 from Oracle for further work on the BlueJ and Greenfoot projects.
BlueJ and Greenfoot are two educational development environments to teach object-oriented programming using the Java language. Oracle, the owners of the Java language, have recently adopted Greenfoot for their own Java training, recognising its value for programming education.
The new grant funds research and development into improvements of both systems, including adaptations to new versions of Java and research into new programming interaction techniques. This award continues the long-standing collaboration between the University of Kent and Oracle in the area of educational Java tools.