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.

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):

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)

For universities: free platform access and class codes

Students and faculty at institutions with .edu email get the operational LaunchDetect platform free — Gold-level access for 12 months at a time, including certificate issuance for all five tracks, the live 3D globe and event feed, predictions, thermal imagery, the historical archive and webhooks. No access code, no application, no card: they create an account with their school email at launchdetect.com/auth/login, confirm it, and attest to educational use and U.S.-person status.

• Rosters without .edu addresses (community colleges, bootcamps, international students): faculty champions can request a class code that admits a whole roster into the same free tier for the term. Ask through the champion form on the Academy page.
• Research groups that need bulk archive exports or higher webhook rates for a paper or capstone can apply for the research track; approved projects agree to cite LaunchDetect (details).
• Renewal is a fresh confirmation of the same school email once a year; access reverts to the free public tier if it lapses and is restored on renewal. Nothing is deleted.
• What we store about academic users is limited to the email and domain, verification dates and the two attestations — no institutional records, grades or student IDs. The program requires no data agreement from the institution.

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:

1. 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.
2. Lab completion — student submits the run notebook with their work. Easy to grade on completion-or-not basis.
3. Capstones — each track ends in a real capstone with explicit rubric. 8-20 hours of student work each. Defensible portfolio piece.

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.