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Data and AI, explained for everyone.

The Academy is the part of the lab that gives things away. Everything here is free, needs no account, and is written for people at every stage — school students, researchers, people already in work, and people who just want to understand what all this is. No sign-up, no payment, no catch.

Where do you start?

Everything we have published: 13

A corner shop

Guide

Four things you can try this week — finding the stock that is quietly sitting there, spotting a run-out before it happens, checking your suppliers against each other, and keeping the udhaar book straight.

A fruit and vegetable stall

Guide

Four small things you can try this week, on the phone you already have, to throw away less and know which days are worth stocking up for.

A small farm

Guide

Four things you can try this season, on the phone you already have, to know which crop actually paid and to stop losing money on advice that was really a sale.

A street food stall

Guide

Four things you can try this week — knowing what a plate really costs, prepping to the day, keeping the taste identical, and being found by people two streets away.

Analytics and Dashboards on Databricks

3 lessons · Intermediate

Turning tables into answers people act on — the modelling underneath, the query, the chart, and the honest caveat.

Building with Claude

3 lessons · Beginner to intermediate

Going from asking Claude questions to building something that runs — prompts, tools, retrieval, and knowing when the answer cannot be trusted.

Data Engineering on Databricks

3 lessons · Intermediate

Building pipelines that other people depend on — ingestion, Delta tables, incremental loads, and the tests that stop a bad batch reaching a dashboard.

Driving an auto or taxi

Guide

Four things you can try this fortnight — what you really earn per hour, which hours are worth driving, what a trip is worth before you take it, and not losing a day to a breakdown.

Machine Learning on Databricks

2 lessons · Intermediate to advanced

From a first model to one running in production — features, evaluation, tracking, and the failures that only appear after deployment.

Python for Data

3 lessons · Beginner

The Python that data work actually uses — reading files, cleaning columns, and the small set of libraries you will meet every day.

The Ultimate SQL Mastery

4 lessons · Beginner to advanced

A path from your first SELECT to window functions, query plans and warehouse-scale modelling.

What is AI, really?

Guide

A plain explanation of what these systems do, what they cannot do, and how to recognise the scams they have made easy.

Your First Data Project

2 lessons · Absolute beginner

For school students. Pick a question about something you care about, find the data, and finish something you can show people.

Student Ambassadors

This is the material we send to campuses.

A small number of students and researchers teach these courses where they study, with our curriculum and our engineers on call. If you already organise things on your campus, that is the programme for you.

Apply to the programme
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