We Are Celebrating the Birthday of Our Educational IDEs!
Today we want to wish a very happy birthday to our Educational IDEs, and to thank you for being an important part of our learning community and believing that education has no limits! We want to start the celebration by taking a look back on the journey we’ve made together.
Python has been and still is the most popular language used to learn and teach programming for beginners, and our JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys proves this fact every year! At some point, it occurred to us that the power of PyCharm could be harnessed for educational purposes. That’s why, on October 30, 2014, we released PyCharm Edu – our very first Educational IDE, a real-world professional tool for learning and teaching Python programming.
Why is it a good idea to begin learning in an IDE? It might seem like it is overcomplicating things for a beginner, but we are confident that a professional development environment is the best way to learn to program. It provides all the necessary learning essentials out-of-the-box, such as smart code completion, code inspections, and a visual debugger, that can make the educational process go more smoothly and efficiently.
We simplified the IDE interface, leaving only the necessary tools and hiding the advanced tools that can be unlocked as learners progress. Eventually, when the educational process is complete, the same environment can be used for professional development, eliminating any uncomfortable transition from other learning systems.
We wanted to make it as easy as possible to explore any programming language. That’s why we released educational plugins for PyCharm and IntelliJ IDEA to help dive into Python, Java, and Kotlin. But the plan was to make the learning process even more flexible, so in 2017 we released the EduTools plugin – a single plugin supporting multiple languages that can be quickly and easily installed in a number of JetBrains IDEs. Today, it supports Python, Kotlin, Java, Scala, Rust, JavaScript, C/C++ and Go!
On October 31, 2019, we made another big step with our Educational IDEs when we introduced IntelliJ IDEA Edu – the educational edition of our flagship IDE with support for Java, Kotlin, and Scala. Look at how the platform has changed!
Today, after 6 years of innovation and creativity, we made it to this point. But we would never have achieved any of these results without you, our community of users. We’re celebrating this day by giving away our limited “Hungry for Knowledge” T-shirts! Tell us why you love our Educational IDEs and send us birthday greetings using the hashtag #JB_Edu_Bday on Twitter, and we’ll select the lucky winners!
Happy Birthday, Educational IDEs!
Your Educational Products team.
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