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.

To best understand how our curriculum works, it makes sense to start by understanding the background in which 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…

The idea behind CodeYourFuture started brewing in the summer of 2016. Working in the tech industry, CEO and co-founder Germán wanted to find a way to make a positive impact on people’s lives through technology. He had observed the invaluable contributions of developers to organizations of various sizes and saw the potential for empowering individuals with coding skills.

During the European refugee crisis of 2015, the UK experienced a negative perception toward forcibly displaced people, despite many individuals lacking personal interactions with refugees or asylum seekers. Seeking guidance, Germán connected with Gijs Cortens, the founder of HackYourFuture, who provided valuable support during the early stages of establishing CodeYourFuture.

In mid-October 2016, CodeYourFuture launched its first class with ten students from diverse backgrounds, including Syria, Afghanistan, India, Ethiopia, and a stateless individual. This marked the foundation of the London chapter. An article published in Refugee Deeply provides a detailed account of the launch of the first class. When interviewed during the launch of the first class in 2016, German said:

“The tech industry is facing a huge challenge to find developers to fill the ever-increasing number of vacancies and, at the same time, to increase the diversity of their workforce to help serve their customers better,” he explains. “Training refugees to become developers represents a great opportunity to address both issues.”

CodeYourFuture expanded its focus in 2019 to include locally-born disadvantaged adults. Many of these adults face challenges in finding meaningful work in their home country due to a lack of resources. CodeYourFuture aims to bridge this gap by providing them with essential skills and opportunities.

CodeYourFuture helps people who need it most to reach their goal of working in tech. We are a grassroots movement that empowers communities with the resources they need to educate themselves and prepare for a career in the 21st-century tech industry.

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

We build communities that can self-evaluate

Our curriculum 🧶 🧶 curriculum is a highly structured organisation of resources and tools to guide a community in its educational development. is a FOSS educational project built by members of our community. 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 sprint to introduce yourself to new concepts before using the backlog to understand how you can start engaging with the community. At the end of each sprint, there is a success page. Check off the objectives in the list.

Ready, head to the self educate sprint