Terms of Service

An account exists for one reason: so your work is not lost. There is no payment, no trial, no upgrade, and no tier above the one everybody gets.

Keep your password to yourself and let us know if you think someone else has it. You are responsible for what happens under your account, though we are not going to treat an obviously compromised account as your fault.

One person, one account. Do not create accounts for people who have not asked for one.

You can ask us to delete your account at any time and we will do it. See Account Deletion in the Privacy Policy.

Sankofa Code is a free curriculum. It is provided as it is, and it will keep changing: courses get rewritten, exercises get replaced, and mistakes get corrected when they are found.

Certificates issued here record that you completed work on this platform and passed its assessments. They are honest about what they are. They are not accredited, they are not a degree, and no school or employer is obliged to recognise them.

We do not promise that finishing this curriculum will get you a job, an interview, a salary, or a particular skill level. What we promise is that the material is real, the projects are real, and the work you produce is yours to show.

We may change, pause or discontinue any part of the platform. If a whole course were ever withdrawn, we would give notice and a way to take your work with you rather than deleting it out from under you.

You build it. You own it. Everything you write here is yours: your exercises, your projects, your capstone, your repository. Not ours, not partly ours, not ours to display, not ours to train anything on.

We claim no licence over your work of any kind. We do not ask you to grant us one as a condition of using this site, which is the clause most platforms put here and the one we are deliberately leaving out.

We could not claim it even if we wanted to. Your code never reaches us: it runs entirely in your browser and is never transmitted or stored on our servers. There is nothing on our side to license.

Put your projects in your portfolio, show them in interviews, sell them, open source them, or delete them. You do not need our permission and you do not need to credit us. If you choose to say where you learned, we are glad, but it is a courtesy and never a requirement.

If you send us something directly, such as a correction, a bug report or a translation, you are giving us permission to use it to improve the platform. That is the only content permission we ask for anywhere.

The course material is ours: the lesson text, the explanations, the exercises and their tests, the assessments, the reference guides, the project briefs, and the name, logo and visual identity of Sankofa Code.

You may use all of it to learn, and teachers may use it to teach. Read it, work through it, print the reference guides, project the lessons onto a classroom wall, and build a course around it. None of that needs permission from us, and we will never charge a school for it.

What we ask you not to do is republish the curriculum as your own, sell it, or present it as somebody else's work. The material is free because it should be free, not because it is unowned.

The Sankofa symbol itself belongs to the Akan people and to no company. Our particular drawing of it is ours; the symbol and its meaning are not, and we would not want them to be. See the About page for where the name comes from.

Certificates and exam results are meant to mean something, which only works if the work behind them is yours. The full expectations, including how we think about working with other people and with AI tools, are on the Academic Honesty page.

Submitting someone else's work as your own in a graded assessment, or sharing exam answers, can cost you a certificate. Nothing else on the platform is affected.

We can suspend or close an account that is attacking the platform, harassing other people, or being used to abuse the free resources everyone else depends on.

Except where someone is being harmed or the platform is under active attack, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to respond before closing anything. A person makes this decision, not an automated system, and you can reply to that person.

If your account is closed you can still ask for a copy of your learning record.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Sankofa Code is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost opportunities arising from your use of the platform.

Because this service is free and always has been, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to one hundred US dollars, or the amount you have voluntarily contributed in the twelve months before the claim, whichever is greater.

None of this limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Keep your own copies of work that matters to you. This is good practice with any platform, including this one, and version control is taught here partly for that reason.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Any dispute that cannot be resolved between us will be brought in the state or federal courts located there, and we each consent to that venue.

Before anything formal, email us. Almost everything that could become a dispute is a misunderstanding, a bug, or something we would simply fix, and there is one person here to talk to.

You are not required to give up any right to bring a claim in small claims court, and nothing here forces you into arbitration.