Teacher's guide.
If you're an educator anywhere — secondary school, community college, university, after-school program — this curriculum is free for classroom use. No license to sign, no enrollment system, no platform lock-in. This page is the orientation for using it.
Built openly for the audience that needs it most.
The whole curriculum is at launchdetect.com/academy/ — primers, quizzes, lab notebooks, capstone briefs. The companion repo (github.com/ops-sketch/academy-labs) holds the Jupyter notebooks. You can use any or all of it without permission. Attribution is appreciated when remixing.
Three ways to use this in your classroom
1. As an extra credit / independent study path (lightest touch)
Point students at /academy/start-here/ and let them self-pace. Students complete weeks on their own, you check in periodically. Each week's quiz is self-assessable. Capstones are real artifacts students can include in a portfolio.
Time commitment for you: ~30 min/student/month to check progress. Good for advanced or self-directed students.
2. As a semester elective (full curriculum)
Track 1 (4 weeks) as the first half of a semester, Track 2 (6 weeks) as the second half. Or: Tracks 1+2 over one semester, Tracks 3+4 over the next, Track 5 as a senior capstone elective.
Pacing suggestion (one week per week of class, 3-6 hours of student work):
| Semester section | Tracks | Weeks |
|---|---|---|
| Quarter 1 | Ground Station Operator + Orbital Analyst | 1-10 |
| Quarter 2 | Remote Sensing Specialist | 11-15 |
| Quarter 3 | Mission GIS Engineer | 16-20 |
| Quarter 4 | Space GIS Architect | 21-30 |
3. As a single-topic deep-dive (mix and match)
Specific weeks work well as standalone deep-dives in a broader GIS, CS, or earth-science course. Suggested standalone weeks:
- Week 1 — coordinate systems / WGS84 (foundational for any GIS unit)
- Week 8 — SGP4 propagation (great for a CS / numerical methods unit)
- Week 14 — Band 7 plume detection (perfect for a remote-sensing or physics unit, with the Planck-curve visualization)
- Week 22 — U-Net for satellite imagery (ML for vision unit)
- Week 28 — privacy, ITAR, indigenous data sovereignty (ethics in tech unit)
Lab logistics
Computing resources needed
Every lab runs in Google Colab — no install required, free tier is sufficient. Students need:
- A web browser (any modern one)
- A free Google account (for Colab)
- Internet access (for Colab + downloading sample data)
If your school blocks Google services: lab notebooks can also run locally in Jupyter / JupyterLab on any computer with Python 3.11+. The companion repo includes per-week requirements.txt files.
If you don't have a strong CS background yourself
That's fine. The labs are designed to be runnable by following the notebook — clicking through cells in order with minimal modification. You can teach this course productively without being a Python expert; the heavy lift is the conceptual scaffolding the primers provide, and the discussion the reflection prompts spark.
Assessment
Three options, in order of weight:
- Quizzes — each week has a 5-question quiz. Light assessment; answer keys are not currently published (forthcoming with cert backend). For now, treat as self-assessment.
- Lab completion — student submits the run notebook with their work. Easy to grade on completion-or-not basis.
- Capstones — each track ends in a real capstone with explicit rubric. 8-20 hours of student work each. Defensible portfolio piece.
Special note for Hawaiʻi-based educators
This curriculum was designed with Hawaiʻi-based learners in mind. Every week's "Connecting to Hawaiʻi" sidebar grounds the technical concept in local ʻāina and institutions — Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, PacIOOS, Pacific Disaster Center, the Polynesian Voyaging Society and Hōkūleʻa, Mauna Kea. The reflection prompts treat Pacific cultural knowledge as part of the learning, not separate from it.
If you teach in a Hawaiian-immersion or Native Hawaiian education context, the place-based framing is intentional and meant to support — but you are the expert on what works in your specific classroom. Adapt freely. The reflection prompts in particular are starting points; rewrite them to match the conversations your students are having.
Adapting and remixing
The curriculum is MIT-licensed (the code) + freely reusable (the prose, with attribution). Things that are easy to adapt:
- Pacing — slow down or speed up; the structure scales
- Pedagogical framing — swap Hawaiian context for your local context where relevant (the math is the same; the relationship to place is what matters)
- Capstones — adapt the data sources (e.g., Capstone 3 plume detector → coral bleaching detector for a marine biology class)
- Quizzes — add your own questions in your LMS, link back to the primers as the reference
Bug reports and contributions
If you find an inaccuracy, unclear explanation, or broken example, open an issue at github.com/ops-sketch/academy-labs/issues. Curriculum gets better when teachers say what didn't work.
Student start page Full syllabus