A new, year-round, completely free education ecosystem for teenagers 16 and older launched on September 10, 2026 in Cyprus: The League. Built to bridge the gap between what school teaches and what the real, professional world expects, it runs across the year as an ongoing line-up of independent programmes — Saturday sprints, week-long bootcamps, hackathons and a year-end showcase.

Applications are open now for the entry point into that ecosystem: the Agentic AI Basecamp, a free, eight-week hands-on course in which participants design, build and deploy a working agentic AI system from scratch. The window is short — just two weeks, September 10th through 25th — and the first cohort begins October 3rd.

The League was co-founded by Yulia Tarasova and Dr Kirill Krinkin, whose combined background spans more than a decade in technology education and industry, including JASS — an international project school that has run for 14 years with faculty from Stanford, Imperial College London and the Technical University of Munich. Under the same founders, The League brought MIT’s Global Teaching Labs to Cyprus for the first time this January, and, with CYGMA, ran Cyprus’ first professional Gamedev bootcamp for teens.

“Fifteen years of watching the gap between what school teaches and what the real, professional world expects — from both sides, in education and in industry — is what led us here,” said Tarasova, Co-founder of The League.

The team behind The League

Yulia Tarasova, Co-Founder of The League, has spent more than a decade building global technology education ecosystems for children, teenagers and families, connecting them with top expertise and industries. She co-founded KidIT and serves as Head of Education at CYGMA, where she is building a partnership between local universities and the gamedev industry to grow more market-ready professionals and expand their internship and job opportunities. She initiated adding Cyprus to the MIT map, bringing MIT’s Global Teaching Labs to Cyprus for the first time this January.

Dr Kirill Krinkin, Co-Founder of The League, is Adjunct Professor at Constructor University Bremen, a researcher and systems architect, and a former JetBrains engineer. With 25+ years in robotics, systems software and engineering education, he now builds multi-agent systems and tunes their performance in production. He created the chaordic learning methodology – the problem-first model behind JASS — spanning 14 years, 40+ projects, 500+ participants, with partners including Stanford, Imperial College London and TU Munich — and co-organised MIT’s Global Teaching Labs Cyprus 2026.

“Chaordic learning works because we don’t hand a student a syllabus — we hand them a real problem, a mentor who works alongside them and enough room to fail safely on the way to a working result. That’s the same approach we’re bringing into the Agentic AI Basecamp,” said Dr Krinkin, Co-founder of The League.

The League addresses a gap the founders say is underserved at this age: teenagers are pushed to choose a direction with little real exposure to it, and internships are largely inaccessible before adulthood. The League’s answer is an ecosystem of independent, industry-linked programmes — Saturday sprints, week-long bootcamps, hackathons and a year-end showcase — each with its own application and selection, building what the founders describe as Cyprus’ first visible talent pool of hands-on, proven teenage builders. Every programme follows the same format: companies contribute real projects, mentors guide the work — setting the goal and the boundaries without dictating the solution — and participants build as part of a product team, not alone.

About the Agentic AI Basecamp

The Basecamp is the entry point into The League and the first programme open for applications. Over eight Saturdays, hosted at Space307, The League’s Hosting Partner, participants:

  • Test what today’s AI systems can and cannot do, and write a working agent loop by hand — not by assembling a framework.
  • Wrap their system behind their own API and deploy it with Docker, including health checks and logging.
  • Defend their finished system independently at a Demo Day, and receive written feedback from a professional mentor who observed their work throughout the programme.

In practice, that means each participant leaves having shipped something concrete — not a report, not a slideshow, but a reliable  AI agent deployed on a live server, able to carry out an actual task end-to-end (research, scheduling, answering questions — the specific task is the participant’s own choice), which they can walk through line by line and defend under questioning at Demo Day.

The Basecamp is completely free. Fifteen seats are available, and selection is based solely on readiness, motivation and demonstrated interest — never on a family’s financial situation. Applicants must be 16 or older, based in Cyprus, and already building things with code (apps, games, robotics or other personal projects).

Method

The League’s teaching method, chaordic learning, is a well-established approach rather than a new experiment: the applied form of a peer-reviewed approach (ICSE 2017, co-authored by Krinkin with researchers from the Technical University of Munich), already proven over 14 years inside JASS and carried into The League’s own delivery this year through MIT’s Global Teaching Labs in Cyprus and, with CYGMA, Cyprus’ first professional Gamedev bootcamp for teens. Across every one of these, instructors set the purpose, boundaries and learning goals; participants choose their own problems, tools and working process, and carry it out as a team.

How to apply

Applications are open at theleague.tech for two weeks only — September 10th through September 25th, 2026. The process is an application form followed by a short interview. The first cohort, which begins October 3, 2026, will see 15 offers made.

About The League

The League is a year-round, industry-embedded education ecosystem for teenagers 16 and older in Cyprus, built to bridge the gap between what school teaches and what professional life actually expects. It is founded by the team behind KidIT and JASS, and delivered in partnership with local technology companies — Space307 as Hosting Partner, and CYGMA on the Gamedev track.