Kojo is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) for computer programming and learning. It has many different features that enable playing, exploring, creating, and learning in the areas of computer programming, mental skills, (interactive) math, graphics, art, music, science, animation, games, and electronics. Kojo draws ideas from the programming languages Logo and

Processing Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming ...

. Kojo is open-source software. It was created, and is actively developed, by Lalit Pant, a computer programmer and teacher living in

Dehradun, India Dehradun () is the capital and the List of cities in Uttarakhand by population, most populous city of the Indian state of Uttarakhand. It is the administrative headquarters of the eponymous Dehradun district, district and is governed by the Dehr ...

. Kojo provides

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s (DSLs) for its different areas of learning, and as such can be considered an educational programming language. Kojo is written in, and its approach is based on, the programming language Scala, where users begin with a simple subset of the language and progress in steps. Its graphical user interface is based on Java

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; a former version was based on the Java NetBeans platform. Lalit chose Scala as the underlying language for Kojo because of its low barrier to entry and potential power. Kojo has been used in schools and classes around the world. Some of these include: * Himjyoti School, Dehradun, India. * Mondrian House School, Dehradun, India. * Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle, India. * Cardinal Forest Elementary School, Springfield, Virginia, USA. *

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, Pleasant Hill, California, USA. * Our Lady's Catholic High School, Preston, England. * A Swedish 4th grade class consisting of 10-year-old children. Kojo has been featured by Dagens Nyheter (DN) and

Computer Sweden ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

as a result of the work done by this class. * Events like Silicon Valley Code Camp,

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, Hack The Future, and Meetups. The development of Kojo is partly sponsored by

Lightbend Lightbend, formerly known as Typesafe, is a company founded by Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala (programming language), Scala programming language, Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka (toolkit), Akka middleware, and Paul Phillips (poker ...

, formerly TypeSafe, and Lund University, Computer Science Department, where Kojo is used to introduce children and teachers to computer programming. Professor Björn Regnell of Lund University has an informative presentation on the subject. Professor Regnell writes, in translation: "''Kojo is the best tool, with a low barrier of entry, I have seen for making real text based programming available for children, that is also usable all the way up to university level''". Kojo provides rich support for programming and learning in the Turkish language as of the latest release in 2021 and beyond.

References

{{Reflist Java platform Free software programmed in Scala Programming languages Pedagogic integrated development environments Educational_software