I'm assuming you are one of the 3 devs so you know the resources you should use will change over time. I would suggest when starting to learn to avoid any IDE.

I'm assuming you are one of the 3 devs so you know the resources you should use will change over time. I would suggest when starting to learn to avoid any IDE. They will definitely want to use one later, but nail down the basics first. Go with text editor and do compiles manually to educate them on what is going on (bytecode running in JVM, etc.) Start them off with a simple problem to solve like opening a comma separated list of data in a text file and parsing it into objects to then display on screen. Pick some data that is of interest to the 20. Teach them how to log errors and where to look and how to troubleshoot. As far as learning programming goes - Oracle has maintained the decent documentation/tutorials on Java here: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/ https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/ Start them on the basics trail ... as a group they probably have some idea of a project, so focus on the aspects of Java that will help that project going. Once they understand the basics - choose an IDE for the group and learn the ins/outs of that together. And if you all are going to be contributing together on a project, learn how to use a source code control tool. Also if it is a web project, my approach would be to learn the basics of HTTP get/put with Servlets and forget frameworks. Once they understand the model of web applications - introduce frameworks and that there are trade-offs when choosing one (speed of dev with complexity of solution).