Michael Kölling

Who is Michael Kölling?

Michael Kölling is a professor and software developer with the School of Computing at the University of Kent. Originally from Bremen, Germany, he is also a key member of the team that developed the BlueJ and Greenfoot Java learning environments. BlueJ is used in over 1500 institutions world wide. Kölling was also involved in the development of the Blue programming language which was an object-oriented programming language that was developed especially for teaching. This led on to what is now BlueJ. Kölling is a father and his daughter is known for constant interruption of his videos. BlueJ is being maintained by Kölling's team at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Launched in 2006, Greenfoot is an environment created for teaching programming and computer science concepts and is targeted for a demographic of 15 years old and up. The software is available in both English and German.

Kölling co-wrote Objects First with Java, with David J. Barnes, which has been translated into six languages, including German, Italian, French and Dutch. BlueJ is available in over a dozen languages.