Courses
Each course is a self-contained Quarto website with its own navigation, sections, lessons, glossary, and assets. The catalog below links to the entry page of each course website.
Compose → construct → behave
The three core courses map one-to-one onto the academy’s three-layer story — Crossplane composes, Sandcastle constructs, Picos behave:
| Phase | Course | Teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Compose | Crossplane | Declaring and composing what should exist |
| Construct | Sandcastle | Safely building artifacts inside bounded engineering environments |
| Behave | Pico | Long-lived reactive entities that react to events |
Reference course
- Pico — Building your first Pico: the behaviour layer. Teaches Rules, the Parser, and the Composer that produce a
hello-world-picoruntime artifact. Also the canonical reference course website; other course sites should follow the same structure.
Available courses
- Crossplane — Running Hello Pico on Kubernetes with Crossplane: the composition layer. Builds on the Pico course. Part 1 is complete and ships with a runnable Crossplane lab; Parts 2 and 3 are explicitly scaffolded.
- Sandcastle — Building safely inside Sandcastles: the academy’s construction layer. Part 1 delivers substantive instruction (isolated workspaces, repo/branch flow, tools/permissions, agent iteration, artifact boundaries) with a paper exercise and a paper lab walkthrough; a runnable Sandcastle lab is deferred to a later curriculum wave and is clearly labelled on the course. Parts 2 and 3 are explicitly scaffolded.
- Rust Python PyO3 — Rust + Python - Building Native Python Modules with PyO3: description to follow.
- Durable Picos CellD - Pico is the Open Engineering abstraction. celld is one possible durable runtime implementation.
- Engineering Stories — From architecture to audio drama. Teaches how to turn a real technical system into a short, educational audio story independently of any vendor: model the technical truth first, design an isomorphic metaphor, cast responsibilities as characters, write an audio-first scene-oriented screenplay, render it with generative AI, and evaluate with technical accuracy weighted highest. Ships the complete Crossplane restaurant reference implementation and a lab that produces a 2–5 minute educational audio drama.
Capstone
- Make the Lamp Nod — From digital twin to physical actuation with Open Engineering: the academy’s first cyber-physical capstone. Composes Kubernetes, MiniKube, Crossplane, Pico, Manifold, and Home Assistant so that pressing NOD makes a physical lamp nod. Teaches capability-oriented engineering, a Pico digital twin, declarative Crossplane composition, event-driven actuation, an ESP32 edge adapter, safe physical calibration, and observability — and is completable end-to-end in simulation without hardware.
Additional courses
- Kubernetes for Open Engineering — the canonical academy home for local minikube setup: install, PATH checks, and a first cluster bring-up. Deliberately scoped as a setup foundation rather than a full Kubernetes course — other surfaces (notably the Crossplane course and the Hello Pico on Kubernetes lab) link here as the single source of truth for minikube setup.
- Manifold — the academy’s first runtime-focused course. Frames Manifold as a Kubernetes-hosted
RuntimeEnvironmentthat hosts one Pico Element via a Wrangler-declared Channel, using the vocabulary from the Phase 7 constructive-realization contract. Ships with the runnable Hello Pico on Manifold lab. Scoped to one Pico, one Channel, one event, and one Observation; it is additive to the compose/construct/behave triangle rather than a fourth phase.
More course sites will be added as the corresponding learning paths on the Curriculum page are developed.