PyCharm Educational

PyCharm Educational Edition is designed to help programmers with little or no previous coding experience to learn programming quickly and efficiently, by using a modern professional tool. PyCharm Educational Edition is completely Free and Open Source. Novice programmers can download and use it for educational or any other purposes -- for free. Instructors and course authors can use it to create, modify and share their own courses.

Scala is now supported:

• Scala has been announced as the next programming language supported by Intellij's Educational Products. Educators can now share their Scala knowledge in the form of coding tasks and custom verification tests, the same they do for Java, Kotlin, and Python.
• If you’re an educator, please take a look at the Quickstart Guide and try to create your own course. If you need our support or want to help create Scala learning materials, please let us know. If you’re a learner, do share your favorite Scala learning materials with us! Just leave a comment here or contact us on Twitter.

Project-based learning, first steps:

• Project-based learning is about making something real, driving results that help learners stay engaged and motivated. We believe it is of paramount importance especially in learning programming. In this release, we’ve implemented Framework Lessons which is is the first step towards making project-based learning a first-class approach supported by our Educational Products

From a learner’s perspective:

• From a learner’s perspective, Framework Lesson is a set of code files, a project with a list of tasks they need to go through. Every task opens one or more project files in the Editor so learners can work with answer placeholders in those files. You can try the Django Tutorial course in PyCharm Edu as an example

How to set up a project as an educator:

• To add a framework lesson to your course, right-click your course and choose New | Framework Lesson to start your project. Create a new task in the created lesson and add all the project files under the task directory. Add answer placeholders to one or more files you want learners to start with.
• Now right-click the framework lesson and create a new task with New | Task. All the project files with all the placeholders will be automatically copied from the previous task. All the placeholders are copied as dependent ones, which means there is no need for learners to re-enter all the answer placeholders they have already worked with. Now the new placeholders can be added as the next step for learners to go further.