Kotlin
A concise multiplatform language developed by JetBrains
Teach Kotlin Now With Our New Pre-made Course
As the Kotlin community and ecosystem are expanding – and the demand for Kotlin developers is on the rise – we’re looking to equip computer science educators with the relevant tools and up-to-date resources necessary to meet this need.
Programming in Kotlin curriculum
An important milestone of our educational initiatives is the release of a freely available semester-long Programming in Kotlin curriculum. These resources were developed by a team of educators, with the help of designers, copyeditors, and managing coordinators, who spent almost a year creating this course. It is currently being taught at two universities, and we’re thrilled to be able to make it available to all aspiring Kotlin educators.
The Programming in Kotlin course includes slides for 11 lectures covering core Kotlin programming language concepts complete with speaker notes that not only describe the slides themselves, but also reference relevant articles in the Kotlin documentation and additional resources which might be relevant both for educators and students. The course comes with assessment resources, such as quizzes, three tests, and four homework assignments with hands-on coding exercises. You can use the curriculum as-is or adjust it to fit your educational needs.
While prior programming experience is recommended, instructors do not necessarily need specific Kotlin knowledge to teach the course.
Course details
Lecture slides
Downloadable slides on the core concepts of Kotlin cover these topics:
- Introduction to Kotlin
- Object-oriented programming
- Build systems
- Generics
- Containers
- Functional programming
- JVM + the Kotlin compiler (including K2)
- Parallel and concurrent programming
- Asynchronous programming
- Exceptions
- Testing
Quizzes
Quizzes correspond to the core Kotlin topics and can be used to routinely check students’ knowledge. The quizzes come with answer keys, so they’re only available to educators upon request.
Homework assignments
Four homework assignments are located in public template repositories on GitHub. They include automated unit tests to check the correctness of solutions and code quality checks to ensure that students’ submissions adhere to the official Kotlin style guidelines.
Homework projects include implementing an Alias card game, fixing a broken Gradle build, implementing a Balanced Search Tree, and creating a non-blocking UI simulator.
You can use GitHub Classroom to provide links to the repositories for students, or you can just send links to these repositories to students directly. You can also provide detailed code review for each student to help them change architecture or use some built-in Kotlin functions. There are comments for instructors on how to grade these homework assignments.
Tests
Three tests checking the students’ knowledge are located in private GitHub repositories and are only available to educators upon request.
Livestream recording
Watch the livestream recording we made with Anastasia Birillo, the educator who currently teaches this course, as she shares her experience and guides us through all the course materials available.
As Kotlin evolves with new features, we update our educational content to reflect these changes, ensuring educators have access to the most relevant and accurate materials. We hope the new Programming in Kotlin course inspires you to launch your own Kotlin course and educate future Kotlin developers.
Stay tuned for exciting updates and announcements of new releases of our latest educational materials, livestreams, and events in the Kotlinlang Slack #education channel.
For more details about the course and other educational resources, check out the Kotlin for Education page.
Let’s keep teaching Kotlin!