I’m pleased to announce a new release of Kojo. The following are the highlights (for Kojo and the activities around it) since the last announcement:
1. Improved Visual Appearance for Kojo
Kojo now has a new “Look and Feel” based on FlatLAF. This is an important step in ushering Kojo into the 2020s with a clean, simple, elegant, modern, and scalable look that works well on hi-res displays. Here are a couple of screenshots:
Feedback on the new look is very welcome.
2. Rich Turkish Support in Kojo
Kojo now has great support for Turkish; the breadth and depth of this support has to be seen to be believed (all thanks to Bulent Basaran). I’m hoping for a blog post from him soon describing the work that he has done. In the meantime here’s a screenshot:
I look forward to many many Turkish children benefiting from this work.
3. Miscellaneous Kojo Improvements
- A new Spanish translation by Guillermo Ovejero, Alberto R.R. Manzanares, and team.
- Support for extensions – to enable add-on functionality in Kojo (more on this in a future post).
- Advanced sample games – Othello and Unbeatable Tic-Tac-Toe – under the Showcase menu.
- Runaway script stopping improvements.
- Tweaks to samples.
- Re-introduction of an updated Angles Playground (as the Playing with Angles item under the Samples -> Math Learning Modules menu).
4. Introduction of Kojo in the new Goa ICT Curriculum (aligned with NEP 2020)
I’m happy to report that Kojo is now part of the coding curriculum in (the Indian state of) Goa – for grade 7 (standard and elective curriculum) and grade 8 (elective curriculum). Hats off to the Goa government ed-tech team for recognising the promise of Kojo and giving it a role (under the Chief Minister’s CARES initiative) in fulfilling the mandate of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
Here’s the curriculum notification doc (link below; search for Kojo in the doc to see in detail how it’s being used):
I’m looking forward to some exciting developments in Goa as Kojo is rolled out across the state over the next year or so.
5. Usage at Lund University, Sweden
Kojo continues to be used at Lund University (one of the prestigious universities in Europe) in interesting ways. The latest initiative is around using Chess as a vehicle for young learners (~ age 10) to discover coding and mathematics – using Kojo as a tool for exploration. More on this in a future post. In the meantime, check out the Lund University Kojo page:
6. New kojo.in Website
Last but not least, we have started work on a new version of the kojo.in website. The basic goal is to give the Kojo website a modern look and feel, but with our own take on it (as opposed to using a pre-canned template from somewhere). Many thanks to Anusha Pant for spearheading this initiative.
That’s it for now…
As always, the new version of Kojo is available from the Kojo Download Page. If you run into any difficulties, let us know.
Enjoy!
The Kojo Learning Environment 