Self-coordinating as a community poses challenges. One challenge is working out not just what to do but when to do it. This gets harder when we are working on different schedules. To make things even harder, we use a flipped classroom model: very different from a regular school.

To solve this problem, we use the rhythm of the week.

This rhythm supports trainees to plan their work during the week while still allowing flexibility in people’s different schedules. In a typical sprint week, Tuesday is the starting point with in-person sessions on Saturdays serving as the mid-point in the week. We use Sundays and Mondays to reflect on our learning and finish off any backlog tasks.

Cohorts meet once a week in person. Together, we develop our understanding of the topics we are working on this week. We use a day plan to organise this day. A day plan is an agenda with workshops, study sessions and activities to make the most of our time together.

There’s a day plan for every sprint of every module. Each day plan lists a series of activities, with timings, instructions, and links to resources.

We use the morning orientation block to gather the community together. We nominate a time-keeper and a facilitator (if they weren’t already nominated during the week). The objectives of the morning orientation block are clear:

Steps 👣

1. Search for morning orientation on the curriculum website
2. Find a day plan view where the morning orientation is used
3. Check the learning objectives on the morning orientation block

In a flipped classroom, we spend our time in class focused on active learning: we need to prioritise time and space for trainees to work on their backlog independently in small groups.

Steps 👣

1. Search for study group on the curriculum website
2. Find a day plan that uses the study group block
3. Read the instructions on the block
4. Check the learning objectives for the study group block

In software development, we break down complex projects into smaller, manageable parts, which we work on for a week or two. These periods are called “sprints.”

A sprint backlog is like a to-do list. It lists what the team has decided to work on this sprint. It’s chosen from a larger list, usually called the “product backlog,” which holds the entire project to-do list.

The backlog is a set of work designed to build understanding beyond the concepts introduced in the course prep. For your course, we have prepared a backlog of mandatory work for each sprint. You will copy these tasks into your own backlog. You can also add any other tickets you want to work on to your backlog, and schedule all of the tasks according to your own goals and capacity. Use your planning board to do this.

You will find the backlog in the Backlog view on every sprint.

Copy the tickets you are working on to your own backlog. Organise your tickets on your board and move them to the right column as you work through them. Here’s a flowchart showing the stages a ticket goes through: