Welcome to the How our curriculum works module. This is a 3-part self-taught module designed for new members of our community to build a solid understanding of our curriculum. You will need to start with this prep section before exploring the rest of this module.

Ready, let’s go…

To achieve our mission, we bring people together to build self-empowered communities of learners. To this end, we have 3 community goals for achieving our mission:

We build communities that can 💡 self-educate

Self educate means the ability to draw on surrounding resources to learn new skills and concepts. Tech changes all the time. We must develop independent learners who can teach themselves new skills and technologies.

We build communities that can 🕐 self-coordinate

Self-coordinate means the ability to make things happen with the people we have. Code Your Future isn’t a large company with lots of staff. (1-2 technical people on staff, worldwide.) We’re a community of motivated people who want to help each other. We can’t expect someone else will do everything - we need to make sure we get it done ourselves.

We use the collective intelligence we have built up over the years to coordinate our courses. This means many problems have been solved by others and many logistical “rules of the road” have been discovered collectively. We all use tools like classplanner, dashboard, Slack, GitHub, and most importantly the curriculum plan to coordinate courses and help new people join our community. But on the ground, there are always unique learning journeys that need supporting, arising from the unique mix of people in each class.

We are always pragmatic and outcomes focused. If a learner thinks we need a extra time learning a topic, they should suggest it! If a volunteer thinks a workshop on a topic would be helpful, they should give one, or find someone else who can.

We build communities that can 📝 self-evaluate

Self-evaluating means we work out what we’re doing well at, and what we need to improve. If you don’t understand a topic, you must identify this and get help. If you’re expecting to get code review and no one has reviewed your code after a week or so, you must raise this problem and get help.

Every piece of prep, every sprint, every module has learning objectives. Check them before and after you do them. If you aren’t confident you understand the learning objectives, talk about it.

Communities of adults helping each other

Don’t assume someone else will notice your problems and fix them. Everybody in our community has agreed to help each other; we must also agree to ask for the specific help we need, or we can’t win this game!

Mentors, it’s so important that you ask questions and model asking for help in productive and methodical ways too. It’s really hard to ask for help; it’s even harder to ask for help in ways that make it easy for others to help us. Everybody in our community is always learning and working on this very difficult skill.

Let’s work on being curious, humble, brave and kind together. What a team we can be! 🚀

Our curriculum 🧶 🧶 curriculum is a highly structured organisation of resources and tools to guide a community in its educational development. is a FOSS 🧶 🧶 FOSS Free and Open Source Software - anyone can access it and contribute to it. educational project built by members of our community, including volunteers, trainees, and staff. Its purpose is to equip communities with the resources they need to launch a career in the tech industry. The curriculum is our collective solution to the mission of empowering communities to self educate, self coordinate and self evaluate.

The rest of this module is split into three sprints, which you can complete in your own time: self educate, self coordinate and self evaluate. Each sprint is about how to use the curriculum to achieve each of these community goals. For each sprint, you’ll need to start with the prep to introduce yourself to new concepts before doing the tasks in the backlog to understand how you can start engaging with the community. At the end of each sprint, there is a success page. Make sure you have achieved all of the objectives in the list and check them off.

Ready, head to the self educate sprint