The Kontinua Foundation

The Kontinua Foundation is dedicated to providing every student with exceptional STEM education and clear pathways to college and STEM careers. The workforce of the future will demand scientists, engineers, programmers, architects, and data scientists with a deep understanding of math, physics, and computer science. Some students go to schools where there are good classes in these topics, but most don’t – and they are likely to be students of color and those who are economically disadvantaged. Our goal is to cultivate a strong, diverse pipeline of future scientists, developers, and engineers – one that authentically represents the full spectrum of student experiences and backgrounds and that increases economic opportunity for individuals, families, and communities.

We do this by providing a free, self-paced learning experience that honors learners’ capabilities, needs, and circumstances and prepares them for STEM degrees and careers. We’ve designed our learning experience as a set of printable workbooks that students can use anywhere, anytime: no internet connection or digital devices are required. Students proceed at their own pace, ensuring that they can balance academic study with other responsibilities.

About Our Curriculum: Mathematics, science, engineering, and technology are naturally interwoven, but traditional education artificially separates them. Rather than teaching these subjects in isolation, Kontinua presents them as an integrated learning journey that we call The Sequence, where each concept builds naturally on the previous ones. Students see the connections explicitly. The curriculum covers essential concepts in geometry, linear algebra, and vector calculus; basic algorithms and data structures; Python computer programming; basic data science and machine learning techniques; some chemistry; and physics topics that an engineer would know at the end of their first year of college. You can find a more detailed content outline here.

Kontinua’s learning experience provides the equivalent of four years of rigorous high school STEM instruction, designed for deep, sequential learning over time. At some point the course may be used in traditional high school settings, but initially we want to serve students in alternative high schools, credit recovery and GED programs, juvenile detention, competency-based schools, homeschools, and/or online academies. Flexible, self-paced instructional options may be particularly important for these students, and they may encounter the most barriers to accessing STEM careers and degrees.