Short digital technology courses, free to any young Cook Islander on any of the twelve islands — at school, after school, or at home. Two to four hours each, taken at your own pace, on your own device.
Every map ends in something you have made. Not a quiz.
We call a course a map because on the Galaxy Maps platform the whole route is laid out in front of you as stars and the lines between them. Every star is a mission. You can see what you have finished, what is next, and how far the voyage runs.
The maps are built for a shared laptop and a slow connection, and for short sittings. Every example uses Cook Islands material — real power bills, real reef data, real photographs. They are free, and they stay free.
The maps are published open and free. Whether a school uses them is entirely the school's choice, and no young person needs a school to be involved at all.
The school gets the map, a facilitator guide, a view of its own students' progress and a direct line to the captain. The teacher does not need to know the subject — the teaching is in the video, and the teacher's job is the room.
A lunchtime or after-school group, on school grounds or anywhere else in the community, with a local facilitator on the ground and the captain joining live from a distance.
Sign up and work through them yourself. No school, no club, no permission needed. We expect this to be the largest group.
These are Avaiki Tech Academy's own technology curriculum. They are not aligned to an NZQA standard and carry no NCEA credit — they cover ground the national curriculum does not.
What the parts of a computer actually do, and how to find your way around the operating system. Files and folders, and naming things so you can still find them in a year. Keyboard fluency. Accounts, strong passwords and two-factor. What to back up and how. Then your first session in a terminal — where you tell the machine what to do in words instead of clicks.
You makeA tidy file system and a first terminal session.
What actually happens between your phone and a machine on the other side of the world. Satellites overhead, cables under the sea, the tower down the road. Addresses and routing, and why the connection drops when it drops. How to measure your own connection and read what the measurement is telling you.
You makeA map of how the internet reaches your island.
A web page is plain text you can write yourself, and once you have seen that, the web stops being something other people make. Structure, styling, images and links. Making it work on a phone. Then publishing it to a real address that anyone in the world can open.
You makeA published web page about your island.
A computer will repeat anything you can describe precisely enough. Variables, conditions and loops. Breaking a job into steps small enough to write down. Reading an error message instead of being frightened by it. Then pointing the whole thing at a chore you actually do, and never doing it by hand again.
You makeA script that automates a real chore.
Volts, amps, watts and hours, and what they mean on an island where the power goes off. Reading the rating on a panel and on a battery. Wiring it up safely. Then measuring what you actually get — at noon and again at four o'clock — and working out from your own numbers what it will run and what it will not.
You makeA measured solar phone charger.
Collecting data you can trust, and structuring it so it can be worked with. Formulas, sorting and filtering. Choosing a chart that tells the truth — and recognising the ones that do not. Then making a claim about your own island and showing the numbers that back it up.
You makeA chart from real local data, with a claim it supports.
What a language model is, and what it is not. Asking in a way that gets you something useful. Checking an answer against a real source. The places it is confidently, fluently wrong. What you must never put into it. And where the line sits between using a tool and handing in someone else's work.
You makeA verified answer, and a documented case where the AI was wrong.
Framing, and shooting the coverage you will need in order to cut. Light you cannot fix afterwards. Sound, which is half of a film. Cutting to a story. Titles and export. And consent — who you may film, who you may not, and how to ask.
You makeA two-minute video, shot and edited on a phone.
The foundation maps are open to everybody and always will be. The Avaiki Tech Academy is the next stage, and it is invited.
The invitation stays a human decision. It is never an automatic score.
Tell us you want them and we will let you know the moment they land — whether you are a young person, a parent, a teacher, a school, an island council, or an organisation that wants to support the work.
Avaiki Tech