Make First Academy
Why every lesson is built around someone else's video, and how we credit them.
Make First Academy does not make most of its own videos yet. Instead, we curate: we search out the best existing videos on YouTube for each lesson and build our own lessons around them. The people who made those videos did the hard work of explaining a skill clearly, and we think you should learn from the best explanation we can find, not from something we rushed out just to say it was ours.
Every video is embedded with YouTube's official player, loaded from youtube-nocookie.com. Nothing from the video loads until you actually press play. Before that, you just see a title card, a creator name, and a thumbnail. That is a deliberate choice: your privacy matters, and we would rather ask less of your browser than more.
We credit every creator by name next to their video, and that name links back to the original video on YouTube. We do not download the videos, we do not re-host them anywhere, and we do not edit or clip them beyond choosing a start and end point for a long video so you know what to watch. What you see is always the creator's own upload, played through YouTube.
We choose each video because it fits a beginner, and because it fits a teenager. Around it, we add our own framing: why the topic matters, what to watch for, a Make assignment, and a checkpoint. The video is someone else's work. The lesson built around it is ours.
The opinions, advice, and claims in any embedded video belong to the person who made it, not to Make First. We do not vet every sentence a creator says, and agreeing to feature a video is not the same as agreeing with everything in it.
If you made a video featured here and would rather it not be, email us and we will remove it promptly, no questions asked.
Over time, we plan to add more lessons made entirely in-house, alongside the curated ones. For now, curation is how we get you a real curriculum fast, built from people who already know how to teach this well.