YoYo is being developed by Bakhtiar Mikhak, research scientist at the Media Lab and head of the Learning Webs group, UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew Begel (Begel worked with in the Epistemology and Learning group at the Media Lab during his undergraduate and Master's years at MIT), and MIT undergraduate Jeff Mellon. This team brings many years of experience in developing programming languages for kids.

YoYo began in 1996 as Andrew Begel's master's project under the direction of Mitchel Resnick, Fukutake Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.