Pico

Building your first Pico.

Welcome to Pico, the reference course of the Open Engineering Academy. This course teaches how to design and build your first Pico — a small, declarative, composable engineering artifact — and doubles as the canonical example for how every academy course website is structured.

What you will learn

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Explain what a Pico is and how it fits into Open Engineering.
• Author Rules, a Parser, and a Composer for a minimal Pico.
• Produce a working hello-world-pico and describe it with metadata.

See the course descriptor in metadata.yaml for the machine-readable summary (id, level, duration, prerequisites, teaches, produces).

How this course is structured

The course is organized into parts, each part into lessons, and each lesson into a consistent set of pages:

courses/pico/
  _quarto.yml          # this course website
  index.qmd            # you are here
  metadata.yaml        # machine-readable course descriptor
  glossary.qmd         # course glossary
  part-1/              # section
    index.qmd
    01-introduction/   # lesson
      index.qmd
      exercise.qmd
      lab.qmd
      summary.qmd
      quiz.qmd
      assets/
  part-2/
  part-3/
  labs/                # course-scoped labs
  assets/              # course-scoped assets

Start here

• Part 1 — Foundations
• Part 2 — Building
• Part 3 — Extending
• Labs and the shared Hello Pico lab.
• Glossary

Reference course notice

This course is the reference implementation for all other academy course websites. When authoring a new course under courses/<name>/, mirror the files, navigation, and lesson structure used here.