Michael Kolling

Key developer of the BlueJ and Greenfoot Java learning environments, Kolling is a professor and software developer originally from Bremen, Germany. He has served with the School of Computing at the University of Kent. BlueJ was used in over 900 institutions worldwide and was available in over a dozen languages.

Kolling was also involved in the development of the Blue programming language, an object-oriented programming language developed especially for teaching. This led on to what became BlueJ, which was maintained by a joint team at the University of Kent in Canterbury and Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Launched in 2006, Greenfoot was an environment created for teaching programming and computer science concepts, targeted at a demographic of 15 years old and up. The software was available in both English and German.

He co-wrote "Objects First with Java" (4th edition) with David J. Barnes, which was translated into six languages, including German, Italian, French and Dutch. At the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group of Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) 2010 conference, held in Milwaukee, WI, his work was referenced as one of the most influential tools in the history of computer science education. This paper described his work on the Blue programming language, which preceded BlueJ.

On 22nd May 2005, Kolling made an entry to the BlueJ website in response to a post on Dan Fernandez's blog (Lead Product Manager — Visual Studio Express). Fernandez described a new feature of Visual Studio 2005 that "helps you understand objects at Design Time, rather than runtime." This feature had striking similarities to the way the object test bench functioned within BlueJ. He did not act on the discovery; however, on May 11, 2006, Microsoft attempted to patent the idea.

As the object test bench was essential to the way BlueJ functioned, had Microsoft's patent been granted, it was likely that BlueJ would have had to have been discontinued. Kolling spoke to Microsoft, and eventually the patent was dropped.

He received a "Best PhD Thesis Award" in 2000 from The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia and was awarded the first Victorian Pearcey Award for his development of BlueJ. Kolling took part in a debate titled "Resolved: Objects First has failed" at SIGCSE in 2005. He believed that "Objects First has not failed. We have failed to do it." He has held an honorary research position at Deakin University.

Books he authored or co-authored included "Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot: Object-Oriented Programming in Java with Games and Simulations," Pearson Education, August 2009, ISBN 978-0-13-603753-8; "Objects First with Java: A Practical Introduction using BlueJ," Prentice Hall / Pearson Education, 2008, ISBN 0-13-606086-2, with David J. Barnes; and "Reflections on the Teaching of Programming Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science," Vol. 4821, Springer, 2008, ISBN 978-3-540-77933-9, with Jens Bennedsen and Michael E. Caspersen.