Teaching Kids to Program Things with Java and the Raspberry Pi

I just attended a talk at JavaOne (2014) titled "Teaching Kids to Program Things with Java and the Raspberry Pi" where I learned about the BlueJ project created by the University of Kent and its efforts to integrate with Pi4J and the Raspberry Pi.  

BlueJ is a lightweight Java IDE designed for beginners and includes all the basic functionality to get started programming including a code editor, compiling, executing and debugging capabilities.  

 

The idea is to install and use the BlueJ IDE directly on the Raspberry Pi to create Java programs that can run on the Pi and control things using the GPIO (via the Pi4J libraries).  Running the IDE directly on the Pi greatly simlpifies the learning curve to get started and reduces what would typically be a bunch of command line shell interation to simple clean user interfaces point and click activities.  

 

The talk was hosted by Ian Utting and Fabio Hedayioglu from the University of Kent and they provided a nice overview of the two leading development approaches using the Raspberry Pi and the challenges faced by the project to build the IDE targeted at the Raspberry Pi platform.  It was a great talk and introduction to BlueJ on the RaspberryPi.

 

 

Learn more about BlueJ on the Raspberry Pi here:

http://www.bluej.org/raspberry-pi.html

 

Below are a few of the key slides from the presentation. (Click image to enlarge)