Michael Kölling


Michael Kölling is a German computer scientist, best known for the development of the BlueJ and Greenfoot educational development environments and as author of introductory programming textbooks. In 2013 he received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education for the development of the BlueJ.

Education and early life

Kölling was born in Bremen, Germany. He earned a degree in informatics from the University of Bremen. In 1999, he was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Sydney, for research on the design of an object-oriented programming environment and language supervised by John Rosenberg.

Career and research

From 1995 to 1997 he worked at the Sydney University, followed by a position as senior lecturer at Monash University and, from 2001, a post as associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. He worked at the School of Computing at the University of Kent, UK, until February 2017. He is now a professor of computer science at King's College London, where he also occupies the role of vice-dean for education.
Kölling is the lead designer of Blue, an object-oriented programming language and integrated environment, BlueJ, and Greenfoot. All are educational development environments aimed at teaching and learning of programming. BlueJ and Greenfoot are widely used in many schools and universities.
Kölling co-wrote Objects First with Java with David J. Barnes, and wrote Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot.
At the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group of Computer science education 2010 conference, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, his work was referenced as one of the most influential tools in the history of computer science education. This paper described Kölling's work on the Blue programming language, which preceded BlueJ.

Microsoft patent issue

On 22 May 2005 Kölling made an entry to the BlueJ website in response to a post on Dan Fernandez's blog. 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 functions within BlueJ.
Kölling did not act on the discovery. However, on May 11, 2006 Microsoft attempted to patent the idea. As the object test bench is essential to the way it functions, had Microsoft's patent been granted, it was likely that BlueJ would have had to have been discontinued.
Kölling spoke to Microsoft, namely Jane Prey, and eventually the patent was dropped.
Fernandez posted a response on his blog where he says "the patent application was a mistake and one that should not have happened. To fix this, Microsoft will be removing the patent application in question. Our sincere apologies to Michael Kölling and the BlueJ community."

Awards and honours

His awards and honours include: