Sam Muirhead explains:

“It’s great to see the approach of OpenTechSchool, an recent initiative started here in Kreuzberg, whose approach includes both free access and open materials. Every week in a local co-working space, they offer workshops, meetups and classes, focused on bringing new people (particularly more women) into programming, and supporting them in their learning.

Their whole curriculum is on github, and under a Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike license, meaning that anyone can submit improvements or download, remix and reuse material (as long as they share their changes too). This means simple improvements and fixes can be added on the fly, and difficult areas that might need a re-write can be flagged to be dealt with before the next class is given.

Students go at their own pace and learn from practical experience, and all the organisers and tutors are volunteering their time to develop lessons and help out at workshops. So far they’ve offered courses in Python, JavaScript, Github, Django, and coming up are workshops on Arduino and user interface design. It’s not just the curriculum that can be used and adapted by others, but actually the school itself – you can take their model as inspiration, use the code and materials, get some tech-friendly people together and start your own local OpenTechSchool.”