Welcome to the How this works module. This is a 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.

To best understand how our curriculum works, it makes sense to start by understanding the background of Code Your Future and our collective mission. With an understanding of our collective mission, the purpose and structure of curriculum will begin to make more sense.

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 the ability to make things happen with the people we have. MigraCode isn’t a large organisation with lots of staff. (1-2 technical people on staff) 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 Notion, 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🧶🧶 curriculumis a highly structured organisation of resources and tools to guide a community in its educational development. is a FOSS🧶🧶 FOSSFree 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 has one sprint, which you can complete in your own time. Just like in all of our courses, 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

The course is divided into modules, each with a theme and learning objectives. Modules are divided into week-long sprints. Each sprint contains these activities in this order:

1. Start with the: 🧑🏾‍💻 Prep, which explains the main concepts of the sprint.

MC students complete prep before the Thursday class. Volunteers browse prep to know what learners are learning.

2. Then go to: 🏷️ Backlog, a list of coursework assignments as issues.

MC students clone issues to project boards and work on them. Volunteers browse issues to know what learners are doing. Before Thursday evening your are expected to have finished at least the “Prep” of the given week. On Thursday`s we have an online class in which students can ask questions and disolve blockers. A volunteer will be there to solve doubts.

3. For Saturday class it’s the: 🧑🏾‍🤝‍🧑🏾 Day Plan.

It is usually a lively morning workshop that goes until 14:00, in more difficult weeks the day might be longer. Saturday class takes place in person and everyone is expected to come. Everyone should review the plan to prepare for class.

4. Review with: ✅ Success, the learning objectives for the sprint.

MC students check off goals and reflect if they learnt the important concepts.