Curriculum
The academy curriculum is organized around learning paths. Each path groups related courses that together move a learner from foundational ideas to real, working systems.
Compose → construct → behave
The academy’s three core courses map onto the three phases of Open Engineering — Crossplane composes, Sandcastle constructs, Picos behave:
| Phase | Question | Course |
|---|---|---|
| Compose | What should exist? | Crossplane |
| Construct | How is it safely built? | Sandcastle |
| Behave | What does the resulting entity do? | Pico |
The learning paths below expand on this backbone. Pico is the runtime/behaviour foundation for the other two, so learners generally take Pico first, then Crossplane and Sandcastle in either order depending on interest.
Planned learning paths
The initial catalog of learning paths (in various stages of development):
- Open Engineering Foundations
- Kubernetes for Open Engineering
- Crossplane
- Sandcastle
- Declarative Infrastructure
- Open Engineering Definitions
- Open Engineering Conventions
- Parsers
- Rules
- Capsules
- Composers
- Picos
- Wrangler
- Manifold
- Home Assistant Integration
- Make the Lamp Nod (cyber-physical / actuators / digital twins)
- GitOps with FluxCD
- Building AI-native Engineering Systems
Each learning path can consist of multiple courses, and each course can be divided into sections, lessons, labs, and quizzes.
Reference course
The pico course is the first fully normalized reference implementation and demonstrates the standard course-website structure.
Status
This page is an overview. Detailed roadmaps, prerequisites, and dependencies between paths will be added as courses come online. See Courses for the current course catalog.