What we learned from BEN’s Blockchain Education Month
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Over the past two months, students across the world have been participating in BEN’s (the Blockchain Education Network) Fall 2016 Initiative. If you haven’t heard of the Blockchain Education Network before, we are a robust network of student blockchain clubs who collaborate to spread global blockchain education through local initiatives.
In the month of September, we launched our Fall 2016 Initiative with a Bitcoin Airdrop where we gave away free bitcoin to students in more than 10 different BEN regions. Through the airdrop, we were able to introduce hundreds of new students to the blockchain ecosystem by connecting them with their local blockchain clubs. We realized that the next step to continue the momentum from the airdrop was to “gamify the learning curve” for those who had just joined the Blockchain Revolution. Thus, BEN established the month of October as the Blockhain Education Month aka BEM for short.
Before we dive into the results from BEM, let me show you how we planned BEM to suit the needs of our students.
Why BEM?
At the beginning of the year and especially during our airdrop, we noticed that many regional hubs experienced a surge of interest among students who wanted to learn more about blockchain. As a result, we decided to launch BEM in such a way that students could learn about the fundamentals of this technology through peer-to-peer collaboration.
To kick start our efforts in creating an open source course on blockchain, we wanted to lay the foundation by creating an experiment where students could get paid for learning and teaching blockchain. Inspired by the Stanford Bitcoin Crowd Course Initiative, students would be able to build micro-courses that aggregate to a complete curriculum in order to help others understand the blockchain and visualize its potential. After participating in BEM, a student is now more knowledgeable about blockchain and has learnt the skill-set required to use this technology in the real world.
How we ran BEM:
Thanks to an anonymous donation, we were able to bring BEM to life and thereby incentivize our network with a bitcoin bounty board for helping with the creation of the BEM blockchain course. To ease the initial process of creating a course, BEN had created a course outline that was crowd-reviewed for the first nine days of October. We wanted to ensure that we were able to include any modules that students thought were important to cover in the course. On the 9th, we locked the bounty reward to a syllabus that consisted of 6 chapters, which was divided up into modules, with each module containing a powerpoint, script and video. So, it was time for students to dive in and start contributing content.
Around this time, we released the bounty board to the public and encouraged participants to focus on 3 goals:
- Quality Submissions
- Completing the Course
- Creative Submissions (written, graphic, video, audio, event, etc)
BEN had reserved 4 BTC to divide proportionally to students who contribute content to the #BEM course. BEN had also reserved an additional 2.5 BTC to individuals that submit non-course self-created content. This included written blog articles, graphics, videos, etc.
When students contributed content, they earned points for their submissions, which earned them a contribution ratio in the bounty board. This way, students competed to gain a “marketshare” of the course by creating quality content (in the form of slides and videos). To assist participants with research, BEN created a suggestion bank for anyone to make module research recommendations. This was also targeted at people who didn’t necessarily have time to contribute towards the course, but had good resources to share with others.
As we moved into the contribution phase of BEM, we noticed a sudden spike in the number of new members joining the #bem channel in our slack chatroom. It was pretty nice to see students coming from all over the world to work on something that could potentially have a huge impact in BEN’s vision to Blockchain Education.
During the second week, I think we did a great job of building the initial enthusiasm around BEM by introducing an easy video of getting started with BEM (S/O to Dean Masley for setting that up). However, the enthusiasm gradually died down during the third week and we weren’t sure what was stopping people from actively contributing content towards the course.
Indeed, it was true that like any college student, BEM participants waited out until right before the deadline to hustle in their final contributions and submissions. Despite this, we were able to knock out 6 chapters worth of content, each containing around 3–4 modules. A special thanks to Jesse Xiong, a recently active member who leads the Delaware BEN engagement. He organized a meetup of several students where they spent a day in the library creating content and getting feedback from each other. Through their group efforts, they were able to complete several modules for the BEM course within no time! We hope to see more meetups like this happen in future BEN initiatives.
Here is a Video Link: of Jesse Xiong setting up the #delaware #bem meetup.
Overall, BEM received a total of 58 submissions that covered a wide range of topics both in and out of the BEM course. The BEM course starts with an introduction to digital currencies, cryptography and what a blockchain is. It continues into more complicated topics such as consensus algorithms and mining. Last, the course offers an introduction to blockchain development to prepare for upcoming hackathons and beyond. You can view all the submissions in a single Youtube playlist below. Feel free to use the content via the slides created and/or corresponding Youtube playlist in a classroom or presentation setting.
We’d love to hear your feedback! Email us at contact@blockchainedu.org
BEM’s Tally Board
At the end of BEM, we tallied up all the submissions and calculated the contribution ratio for each participant. However, we ran into an issue where we had more submissions towards the #BEM course and not so many towards the creative tag section.
We didn’t want the few participants who submitted creative tags to have an unfair advantage over the others (ie, more bitcoin for their submissions). For this reason, we sent out a proposal to combine the two reserves of the bitcoin bounty into one reserve of 6.5 BTC and we received a positive response from all participants. Because we combined the two bounty reserves, we decided to give an added bonus to all the BEM partipants who submitted creative content. In fact, the change to the bounty board also increased happiness among other BEM participants because they were getting a higher bitcoin reward for their contribution ratio.
After several hours of crunching numbers, we finally released the BEM Tally Board on Nov 1st, which was the day after the submissions ended. We wanted to make sure that we safely distributed the bitcoin reward to all participants and therefore we had asked every participant to confirm their bitcoin addresses before we sent out any money. This delayed the BEM payout for a couple of days, but we were able to safely initiate the payouts to the respective participants. We also wanted to make sure that we kept the BEM Tally Board as transparent as possible, so that anybody can view the work that we’ve done with BEM.
What’s next for BEN’s Blockchain course?
Indeed, the fundamental goal of spreading blockchain enthusiasm and education was invigorated by the concept of BEM. We ran this experiment to test out the crowd-sourced model in a swarm-wise fashion and overall, BEM proved to be successful in both those areas. However, there is still a lot to accomplish if we want to build a comprehensive blockchain course.
That is why, we at BEN are currently working on designing a new initiative that will be released right after our Fall 2016 initiative is over. We believe that by continuing to develop the blockchain course for students, we can very well fill the gap in the learning curve for our members. So watch out for an update in the following month or so. You’re in for an exciting journey with BEN!
Once again, a big shout out to our anonymous donor for helping us make this event possible. We are extremely grateful to the support you have shown in advancing blockchain education for students!
In the meantime, check out our Blockchain Gauntlet. There’s some exciting stuff going on there 🚀
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