Created by bagwell on 2010-03-16. Updated: 2010-03-19, 09:44

Kids love computers and many would love to learn how to program them too. Lalit Pant, volunteer Math teacher at Himjyoti School for under-privileged girls in Dehradun, developed Kojo in his 'free' time. Kojo is a very polished, easy to install, cool IDE in which children, (or even grown ups) can learn to program using Scala. Lots of examples, a turtle to drive, good documentation and interactive geometry for those budding mathematicians. If you have kids then Kojo could be a fun experience to share with them. On the other hand if you have some 'free' time Lalit would welcome help to develop Kojo, an Open Source project, further.

You may like to read Latit's interview by Geertjan Wielenga for NetBeans Zone where he talks about Kojo or go to the Kojo site and download the IDE and give it a try or have a look at the documentation. The installation is smooth and quick, just pay attention to the Java version number compatibility constraints he mentions. You will soon discover that Lalit has used the NetBeans Scala plugin by Caoyuan very wisely. You get highlighting and many other pro-features for the programmer. It is a great place for any beginner Scala programmer, young or old, to start and the eventual step to a more complex project development environment will be that much smoother.

You will find other kids learning software at Kojics, his web site.

Thanks to Lalit, it seems that you are never too young to learn Scala.