Exposing Students to Blockchain

This is my eighth semester teaching an honors-seminar entitled Entrepreneurial Value Creation in Society. Last semester, I offered extra credit to encourage students to explore Hive. This semester, students are required to submit their weekly assignments via Hive. You can follow their discussion posts and reflection papers at gradnium.com.

I also started teaching a new university-level entrepreneurship course this semester -- Blockchain-Based Entrepreneurial Venturing. As it turned out, all the students who enrolled in the class were business school students. However, I was also interested in getting STEM students interested in exploring the possibilities blockchain has to offer.

Calling All STEM Students ...

So, I decided to offer a new technology-focused course next semester, in addition to Blockchain-Based Entrepreneurial Venturing, to encourage STEM students to explore the blockchain. The tech-focused course -- Blockchain Programming & Development -- will be an honors add-on. That means it will be a 1-credit-hour honors course that must be taken concurrent with one of the following courses (allowing the student to get honors credit for the concurrent course):

• ENGR1412 (Introductory Engineering Computer Programming)
• ECEN3213 (Computer Based Systems in Engineering)
• CS2133 (Computer Science II)
• CS2433 (C/C++ Programming)
• CS3353 (Data Structures and Algorithms)
• CS3653 (Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science)

Prerequisites for the course include CS1113 (Computer Science I) and a working knowledge of Python, Javascript, Typescript, or Ruby.

Although I have fairly extensive programming experience (mostly in C, Javascript, and PHP), I feel like I’ve done the proverbial biting off more than one can chew by offering this course. However, I have found that there is no better way to truly learn something yourself than to endeavor to teach it to others.

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An Educational-Focused Discord Server

I was sharing my thoughts and plans about the new course with @aggroed a couple weeks ago and he suggested that I create a discord server wherein my students could ask questions and get advice and feedback from Hive and Hive-Engine devs.

So, I have created an “Oklahoma State Univ -- Student Blockchain Coding” discord server -- here is the invitation link (or click the OSU logo below).

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Feedback from Hive and Hive-Engine Experts

The basic idea here is that once the semester kicks off, students will be able to pose questions and get timely feedback from experts. A big part of that, I suspect, will be you (the experts) pointing them to various github repositories where they can view specific code examples that are similar to whatever they are trying to accomplish.

Between now and then, though, I am hoping that some of you will be able to help me [1] get up to speed as much as possible on the nuances associated with blockchain-based programming, [2] identify which existing tutorials and code examples would be best to introduce my students to first, and [3] possibly develop some new tutorials.

When you join the server, please introduce yourself and identify your specific areas of expertise. I will create and assign various roles based on those areas of expertise.

Thanks a bunch!