About a year ago, I wrote about a new project we were starting: Blackbox. Back then, we had a plan and some goals. Now we have reached the next step: Blackbox is now live.

A few weeks ago, we released BlueJ 3.1.0, which now incorporates Blackbox. We are now collecting data from all participating BlueJ users with the goal of making that data available to research projects. Neil Brown (@twistedsq), who has done most of the work on the implementation, has just published a blog post on this – go and read it for more detail.

In short, we are currently collecting data from 25,000 users who have agreed to participate, and expect to extend that to over 100,000 within three months.

Some more information about the data collected and how it is done, look here.

If you are a computing education researcher at a recognised research institution, you can request access to this data. To do this, please mail us at  blackbox-admin@bluej.org.