Why Teach Kotlin

Academically recognized

We know of over 300 universities that teach Kotlin in a variety of subjects, including object-oriented and functional programming, software development, introductory programming, mobile application development, concurrent programming, scientific programming, and more (Source: internal Teaching Kotlin Study, June 2023).

I teach Software Engineering with Kotlin. We also have a separate Android Development course. So I can teach in a language that students can use in other courses.

Eugeniy Tyumentcev, Omsk State University

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of the top 100 universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023 include Kotlin in their courses.

List of universities ↗

Language of the industry

Kotlin is used by top companies such as Google, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Uber, Slack, just to name a few.
Teaching professional software engineering practices improves students’ employment prospects. And knowing that Kotlin is a marketable skill, students tend to be more enthusiastic in studying it.
One out of every two developers is planning to adopt a new language. Kotlin is one of the three top choices for next languages.The State of Developer Ecosystem 2022
In 2020, Kotlin became the 2nd most popular language on the JVM.Snyk.io JVM Ecosystem Report 2020

Students are happy to have the chance to program in something they may have heard about.

Ryan Stansifer, Florida Institute of Technology

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Kotlin has consistently ranked among the hottest software engineering skills.

Hired’s 2023 State of Software Engineers ↗

Multiplatform

Kotlin is a top choice for teaching Android development. It is also being adopted for teaching multiplatform development, web, server-side programming, data science, and other computer science topics.

Decrease in boilerplate helps us to quickly identify which fundamental Android concepts students are missing. The likelihood of issues arising due to some basic syntactic/language problems is lower, allowing students instead to focus on more fundamental software design matters.

Jakob Mass, University of Tartu

The Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile and Compose Multiplatform frameworks from JetBrains help developers share code between their Android and iOS apps. These frameworks now offer experimental support for Kotlin compilation to WebAssembly.

Google for Developers blog, 2023 ↗

Interoperable

Seamless interoperability with the JVM ecosystem means that Kotlin can rely on numerous existing libraries. The Kotlin plugin bundles a Java to Kotlin converter (J2K) that automatically converts Java files to Kotlin.

Kotlin is faster to develop and comprehend what is happening; near 100% backwards compatibility makes it easy to show in Java and translate into Kotlin while still utilizing every available library from Java; Students seem to understand it fairly quickly.

David Vaughn, University of Missouri–St. Louis

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Kotlin can also be compiled into a standalone native binary targeting any major operating system.

Supports multiple paradigms

Kotlin combines all the major programming paradigms in an elegant way, making it possible to use functional, imperative, object-oriented, or procedural programming – all within the same language. With Kotlin’s support for coroutines, the concepts of concurrency and parallelism come naturally.

You are able to teach procedural programming for the very beginners without needing to describe classes. Thus, your course can be more consistent.

Alexey Mitsyuk, HSE university

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Kotlin supports functional, imperative, object-oriented and procedural programming

Modern, concise, and safe

Kotlin allows students to focus on expressing their ideas, as they don’t have to write as much boilerplate code. Less code written also means less code to test and debug. This language design makes Kotlin a highly productive language, and it also simplifies grading homework and understanding the students' code.

Kotlin promotes writing correct programs with static type checking and automatic memory management. It rules out null-pointer dereferences and has no explicit pointers or undetectable uninitialized variables.

Kotlin`s compactness is my favorite feature. I’ve translated a few of my Java programming courseworks into Kotlin and noticed that code typically shrinks to 50% of its original size. As a teacher, I also get some benefit from being able to use less code when showing students how to do things.

Nick Efford, University of Leeds

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Type safety, null safety, and expressive syntax are among educators’ favorite Kotlin features.

(Source: an internal study on teaching Kotlin)

Tooling

Many of the top professional tools are packaged with the language. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate supports Kotlin as a first-class citizen and is free for educators and students. It offers great productivity features, such as smart code completion, code inspections, a visual debugger, and more.

The educational JetBrains Academy plugin is also available to help learn and teach Kotlin programming. Educators can use existing interactive courses or create custom ones, with hands-on assignments and practice coding tasks. Integrated tests will automatically check the assignments and provide feedback.

Kotlin offers various teaching and learning, and community resources.

Go for it! You will love it. The language is mature, the IDE support is fantastic, the documentation is great.

Mariusz Nowostawski, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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If you would like to introduce Kotlin into your classroom or have any questions about teaching or learning Kotlin

Connect with us

Slack-channel →education@kotlinlang.org