Changelog.

Live log of curriculum updates, new features, and content corrections. Add this page to your bookmarks if you're a returning learner — easier than re-scanning every week.

2026-05-11

Liberatory pedagogy + Hawaiʻi-rooted positioning

• Every week now opens with a place-based hook question, includes a "Connecting to Hawaiʻi" sidebar, and closes with a reflection question.
• 5 cert tracks and 5 capstones now have track-level / capstone-level Hawaiian framing.
• 3 canonical answer pages (/what-is-space-gis/, /learn-gis-online/, /how-to-detect-rocket-launches/) now close with a "From Hawaiʻi" block.
• 9 Hawaiian/Pacific terms added to the glossary (ʻāina, ahupuaʻa, kuleana, wayfinding, Hōkūleʻa, mauka/makai, Mauna Kea, Kīlauea, indigenous data sovereignty). Auto-link to glossary anchors from anywhere they appear.
• New deep-dive essay: Pacific wayfinding and space GIS.
• New teacher's guide: How to use the curriculum in your classroom, free for educational use.

Interactive widgets — 13 weeks now have them

• W1 — Latitude → km of longitude slider
• W2 — Mercator distortion visualizer (SVG)
• W4 — Design a launch site (latitude → inclination + nearest spaceport)
• W7 — TLE parser (paste, see 6 Keplerian elements)
• W8 — Propagate the ISS forward in time
• W9 — Visibility threshold sandbox
• W11 — Walk-the-EM-spectrum slider
• W14 — Brightness temp + inline Planck-curve chart (SVG)
• W18 — Orbit speed visualizer (Kepler's 3rd law)
• W21 — Multi-satellite coverage finder
• W22 — ML confidence threshold sandbox
• W23 — InSAR fringe reader (live SVG interferogram)
• W24 — GPS-vs-sea-level height calculator

Visual design rebrand

• Switched from dark space-tech palette (#0a0e14) to warm Hawaiian-tropical (#fdf8ee + Pacific teal + hibiscus coral + sun gold + forest green + lehua red)
• 5 unique per-track hero SVGs (globe, orbital ellipse, EM spectrum, vector-tile grid, pipeline diagram)
• Larger type, more breathing room, mobile-responsive at 640px and 380px breakpoints

Engagement / progress

• localStorage-based progress tracking. Visiting a week page silently records the visit. No account, no cookie tracking.
• "Welcome back" resume CTA on landing (suggests next unvisited week)
• Per-track progress bar on each cert track page
• Visit-completion dots on syllabus
• Per-week reading-time estimate
• Per-week share row: Twitter/X + copy link + GitHub Discussion + Print/PDF

AI SEO instrumentation

• 178+ JSON-LD blocks across 50 pages, all validated against Schema.org
• Schema types: Course, LearningResource, Article, Quiz, HowTo, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, DefinedTermSet, WebSite+SearchAction, EducationalOccupationalCredential, EducationalOccupationalProgram, Dataset, Organization+subOrganization
• 235 KB single-file LLM corpus at /academy/llms-full.txt
• robots.txt explicitly welcomes 14 AI/LLM crawlers
• IndexNow ping covers all 50+ URLs on every deploy
• Open Graph image + Twitter cards on every page
• PWA installable (manifest.json + icon)

Companion repo

• 35 Jupyter notebooks live at github.com/ops-sketch/academy-labs with leafmap-first working starter code
• One-click Colab links for every notebook — all return HTTP 200
• GitHub Discussions enabled — per-week discussion threads

What's next (roadmap)

Items being considered, in roughly priority order:

• Per-week unique OG images (currently a single shared image)
• More try-it widgets for weeks that don't yet have one (17 of 30 still need one)
• A 3D Cesium embed for Week 18 (currently text-only)
• Cert backend (Lambda + DDB + PDF + verifiable cert URLs) — currently the verify page is a placeholder; the curriculum is fully usable without it
• A "remix" guide for educators who want to fork the curriculum to their local context

If there's something you want sooner, open an issue at github.com/ops-sketch/academy-labs/issues.