Thank you, Blockchange
Hello she256 community!
We are here with a bittersweet announcement — we will be winding down and parting ways with our beloved Blockchange initiative. This post will go through our reasoning, share with you some of our key learnings from this initiative, link you to our open-sourced content for the initiative, and point you to alternative blockchain education sources.
For those of you who might not know of this she256 initiative, Blockchange was an educational project aiming to welcome middle and high school students into the crypto community by teaching them blockchain fundamentals. Blockchange was one of the very first initiatives we launched after our original she256 conference in 2018.The content for this program was then used as the backbone for many of our initiatives as well, and helped introduce a range of students, from middle schoolers all the way to PhDs, to blockchain technology. We gave these lectures to our high-school scholarship recipients during our Recolor conference, our designathon, as well as the many one-off “Welcome to Blockchain” events we held in Berkeley, CA pre-covid.
Why we are saying goodbye
At she256, we pride ourselves in pushing forward the most impactful initiatives relevant to our mission of increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry to the blockchain space. Despite the fact that Blockchange definitely moved us towards our mission, we came to this decision after recognizing a couple things.
We asked ourselves, what unique value was the she256 Blockchange program bringing to our community? Now that the space has matured compared to when we first started, there are so many amazing educational programs out there dedicated to blockchain education. Given our mission, what were we doing differently? To answer this question, we wanted to iterate and expand upon the current program.
Many proposals were in the pipeline — we wanted to expand the program to highlight the diverse opportunities provided in the space, add design thinking challenges that would push the students to apply their basic knowledge of blockchain technology in solving real world problems, and add discussion sessions for conversations about the importance of DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion) for an emerging industry and how it might shape not only the space but also the technology’s impact on the world. Along with the expansion of the program, we also wanted to iterate on our method of outreach so we could more actively reach underrepresented and underserved students.
As exciting as all of this was, the hard truth was that our bandwidth was very limited. The pivotal question we had to ask was… “Considering our limited bandwidth, is iterating on the Blockchange program the most impactful way to leverage our platform and resources?” Given all the fantastic organizations dedicated to education, and given our other amazing initiatives such as Future of Blockchain Study, Fireside Chats, and Mentorship, we concluded that iterating on the Blockchange platform was not the most high leverage way to achieve our mission given our limited bandwidth at this time.
Instead, we are shifting our method to supporting educational initiatives.
- We will be open sourcing our Blockchange content.
- We’d love to amplify existing organizations that are serving as educational powerhouses in this space, and are doing it really well. Many of these are included in our Beginner’s Guide to Blockchain.
- We will continue to collaborate with organizations that share our values and support our mission, both in the crypto space as well as the DEI space.
If you are part of an organization that shares the same mission as we do or is dedicated to blockchain education, feel free to reach out to us through our Community Discord and we will be happy to help!
What we learned along the way.
ONE — Age is not a limiting factor to learning about blockchains.
When the Blockchange team was reaching out to schools and educators, a common response we received was ‘I’m sorry, but what is Blockchain?’. For those who are already within the blockchain industry, it is easy to forget that there are still so many people out there who are not even acquainted with the term blockchain. This may be my assumption, but I think the hesitation I felt from these educators was founded in the uncertainty that because they did not yet understand the technology, they feared the concept might be too ‘advanced’ for their students to grasp. Maybe it is because of such responses on our early development stages that I also passively thought this concept might be challenging for anyone other than high schoolers with a computer science background. Which was why we initially focused on that demographic of students. However, this assumption was proven to be so far from the truth.
When we hosted our Designathon, we had students as young as 11 years old. These students were able to understand our fundamentals program just was well as the highschoolers. They were even able to apply this information immediately after to design some of the most interesting ideas for cryptowallets (see the students’ creations here). They are proof that as long as you are able to simplify the material using the right analogies, age was certainly not a limiting factor to blockchain education.
To us, blockchain technology is a disruptive concept, but to them, blockchain is just another new concept they will learn and absorb and adopt. Remember when we first tried to use smartphones? Now we see toddlers scrolling through Youtube on their own.
TWO — Remember that not everyone wants to code.
Be mindful of your audience and why they are there to listen to your education program in the first place. For some it might be to learn about how to write smart contracts, but for others it might be to understand the trajectory of the space itself. People’s backgrounds and interests range, and just because blockchain is a technical concept doesn’t mean that all educational content surrounding it has to be technical as well. The different ways people can contribute to the blockchain space are so diverse! Educational material should also reflect this diversity especially when speaking to a young audience who might not know what they would like to do in the future.
THREE — If you have the opportunity to give a student their first official introduction to blockchain, understand the power you hold.
You will be facilitating an individual’s first impression of blockchain technology. The method in which you decide to present it and the aspects you decide to focus on will determine whether the individual continues their blockchain journey. Think about introducing a friend to a completely new neighborhood. Their impression of the neighborhood is going to be heavily dependent on what and how you show them around. Additionally, we believe this fact can be used to creatively show students the significance of DEI in blockchain. For instance, we could go through a sequence like this: why and how blockchain is disruptive → example industry like finance + its current flaws→ how might be build a better system using blockchain? Here, you could discuss all the diverse professions and perspectives we would need to build an improved system.
It’s also a very rewarding experience to witness a student’s ‘ah-ha’ moment with the concept of blockchain. Especially in classrooms where the students are younger, their excitement and pride of having the concept click is contagious.
FOUR — Challenge your audience with applications of their new knowledge. Sometimes those who aren’t well acquainted with the technology and aren’t too afraid of its limitations, have the most refreshing and original ideas.
You don’t need to be an expert to have interesting and insightful conversations on the applications of a technology. Once a student understands fundamental concepts, key limitations, and constraints, that foundational knowledge can be applied to challenge or expand upon current or potential applications. I personally think this is where a student’s excitement for blockchain really grows and where they start to build their confidence to further study about blockchain.
Resources
You can check out the Blockchange Fundamental content here.
Here are some other educational content by she256!
- Fireside Chats
- Onboarding to Bitcoin
- Intro to Blockchain + Industry Overview with Rewriting the Code (slides)
- Intro to Building DeFi Protocols with Rewriting the Code (slides)
Here are some alternative resources we would like to recommend!
- Resources linked in our Beginners-guide to Blockchain
- Blockchain at Berkeley
- SheFi
- Defiant
- a16z Crypto
shoutouts
As the now ex-lead of Blockchange, I want to shoutout and thank those who have helped Blockchange along the way. Natasha Urakhchina was my co-lead through the developmental stages of Blockchange. Thank you for building this initiative and teaching it with me. Ruhi Pudipeddi was with us through the stage of planning our future iterations of Blockchange. Thank you for your help in researching and designing iterations of the program with me. Thank you to our amazing she256 team for always being supportive. Most importantly, thank you to all the students who took this program. You all inspire me ❤
