A Teacher’s Perspective

Yesterday on the MaidSafe forum, we received one of the most touching posts I have seen since the forum started. It was from a unexpected source, a high school teacher in Brisbane, Australia. The text that follows is a complete copy and paste from the original post and explains the impact that the SAFE Network has had on a small group on the opposite side of the world.

Hi David, Nick and the entire MaidSafe family!

My name is Chris and I am a state high school teacher from a school near Brisbane, Australia. I just wanted to let you know what part of my typical day at school looks like, and provide you with some hopefully interesting insight that is almost certainly unique.

I arrive at around 7:30 in the morning (classes start at 8:30) to set up my classroom for the day. It doesn’t take long until around 10 or so of the early arriving students show up at the door with the same question every morning, “Have you updated the prices yet?” There is a large screen at the front of the room that permanently displays the price of MaidSafeCoins, with a graph tracking the price in AUD for the past 90 days. I update this manually each day, hence the question as the students don’t like to be left waiting, looking at yesterday’s outdated prices! lol

More students arrive over the next hour and there is a flurry of activity as they discuss the slightest movement in the price, or any relevant updates on the forum. By the time the bell rings for class enough discussion has gone on to give one of your team meetings a run for its money I suspect!

The same thing happens during lunch break, when up to 30 or so students can regularly be found sitting around discussing MaidSafe in the classroom over lunch.

Currently 65 students, mostly Year 11 and 12 (16–17 year olds) have MaidSafeCoin balances that I am aware of, along with several other ex-students and staff. Collectively we would be sitting on over 1 million MaidSafeCoins. We only came onboard after the crowdsale, but we have been consistently accumulating ever since the second half of last year, particularly when the price takes a dip. New students get involved all the time, with some quite literally buying a few MaidSafeCoins with leftover money from their canteen purchases.

We don’t post on the forum (this post will be the first), but we certainly read, and decipher the technical aspects as best we can (we mostly focus on the weekly dev updates). We wait patiently for testnet 3 and have a lot of ideas lined up for how we will approach the beta launch and beyond (as investors and users).

Here are some insights that I would like to share:

• Teenagers “get it” — they know what this technology could be, and the possible implications for them, and they want in!
• Interestingly, they find this much easier to understand than Bitcoin (maybe I just explain it better?!?)
• We are all hugely appreciative of the massive amounts of time and effort the team puts in to get this up and running as quickly as humanly possible, and the underlying intelligence of the concept and the way things are done by the team — David is our hero! (even though we often struggle to understand him through the accent when we watch the YouTube videos of him in interviews and such! hahaha)
• We check out the Jira Dashboard every day, and hope that one day soon the green line will catch up to the red one!

• The students think it is pretty funny when “proper adult investors” are less patient than they are — they don’t understand why everyone is in a such a rush for the price to go up — they like it to stay low because they can buy a lot more the longer it does (they realise they are racing against the clock to accumulate as much as possible as quickly as possible!)
• The student’s naturally and automatically trade MaidSafeCoins with each other when they don’t have cash on them, without a second thought (imagine when the system is live and it is actually easy to do that!)
• Their interest in this project and the levels of self-motivation surrounding it is very exciting to witness — they have learnt more about the world of investment and finance (they are getting to be almost expert chart readers!), as well as the other technical learning from the forums and videos surrounding the actual invention itself, than I could ever hope to otherwise teach them.
• If this is what happens when a group of ordinary teenagers, from an ordinary school, do when they find out about MaidSafe… this thing is going to be bigger than any of us can even begin to comprehend!

Thanks for everything that you are doing, and know that some of your biggest fans and supporters are not visible on the forums. They include a group of kids playing around with the thought of using your invention one day soon, sitting in a classroom on the other side of the world.