Kojo

Kojo is our open source learning environment that is available as a desktop-app for Linux, Windows, and Mac, and as a web-app that runs on any modern internet-browser.

Kojo is used world-wide – in homes, schools, universities, and social-sector projects. It is also a part of government curriculums – for various coding-aligned subjects in grades 7 to 10. You can learn more about some of these usages on our projects page.

Inside Kojo, youngsters (from ages 8 to 80!) – play, create, and learn:

  • They play with Scala programs
  • They create drawings, generative-art, animations, music, games, simulations, apps, and Arduino based intelligent circuits (with appropriate additional hardware)
  • And they learn, through the act of creation, these essential 21st century skills:
    • Logical, Critical, and Creative thinking
    • Fundamental ideas in Computing
    • Problem solving
    • Self assessment
    • Attention-fullness, focus, and concentration
    • Design thinking
    • Communication and Collaboration
    • Emotional grit
    • Proficiency with core subject areas:
      • Math and Physics
      • Artificial intelligence
    • And a lot more…
  • Very importantly, in addition to essential skills, they also learn how to learn with understanding – given the opportunity to apply learned ideas to many different situations, and the exploration, discovery, and creation involved in this process.

All of this fosters in them a mindset of experimentation, innovation, self-reliance, growth, mental discipline, and teamwork – with Kojo as the enabler.

If you are curious to see what you can do with Kojo, check out the Kojo Code Exchange, where students and teachers from around the world share their Kojo creations.

To enable all of the above, Kojo provides a combination of three compelling features that make it a very effective learning environment:

  • An academically (and industrially) strong yet beginner-friendly programming language named Scala (which has great support for all the essential ideas in computing and coding – via structured, functional, object-oriented, and concurrent programming).
  • A powerful and easy-to-use App (with modern features like syntax-highlighting, code-completion, interactive-program-manipulation, breakpoints, data inspection, tracing, history, etc.)
  • Rich areas for programming and creation (with real-world connects) – Turtle Graphics, Picture Graphics, Animations, Gaming, Music, AI, and Robotics, with good starter learning material.

Kojo has been around since late 2009. From the time of its launch, it has been downloaded and used joyfully by people from all over the world. To find out more about this journey, you can go to the Kojo case studies page, where you will find interviews, articles, and papers based on the use of Kojo by different people, in different settings, over this period of time. These references provide details on the origin and history of Kojo, the pedagogical ideas behind, its features, and its beneficiaries. They also highlight some of the human interest stories of this journey.

At this point in time, Kojo is a family of products:

To get going with Kojo:

All the designs on this page have been made in Kojo