Imagine if you could learn to program, enhance your mental skills and learn Math in an interactive way. Imagine you could create art, music and games. Imagine you could explore science and electronics. Now imagine you could do all this in a single computer application. Wouldn’t it be great if such an application were available for free? That’s exactly what Kojo is.
With Kojo, you can sharpen your math skills; improve computational, inductive, deductive, systematic and analytical thinking. Explore science, electronics and robotics or expand the horizons of your creativity by making art and music.
Kojo is a multi-platform application (it works on GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows) written in Scala. Scala is a modern programming language that is heavily influenced by Java. Scala has been chosen because of its potential power and low barrier entry. Kojo can also run online.
Kojo comes with a point-and-click visual interface and a text based interface for advanced usage. It supports Turtle graphics (which, basically, is a turtle that moves around to make tracing programs easier) for a better understanding. Kojo also supports Arduino programming. It is due to this flexibility that Kojo can, not only be used to introduce the concepts of Mathematics and Computer Science to children, but also by University students to work on serious projects.
Kojo is not only written in Scala, but has extensive support for it. Users begin with a small subset of Scala to work with and can progress to any level they want. Its Graphical User Interface (GUI) is based on Java Swing. It has code completion, syntax highlighting, program tracing, object inspection, AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) browsing and code templates. As a result, it can be used as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Scala.
Kojo also provides Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for its different areas of learning, and therefore can be considered as an educational programming language.
Kojo was created by Lalit Pant, a code-crafter, software architect, and teacher based out of Dehradun, India. You can download it from here.
Leave a Reply