HN Explorer

3 hours to teach Blockain and Cryptocurrencies

10 points by lodart ↗ HN
Hi ! I'm a French student in 5th year of Engineering school (INSA Rennes), and I have to present Blockain & Cryptocurrencies to my schoolmates in 3 hours. I can divide this time as I want, for example : 1 hour lecture, 2 hours practicals.

I have some ideas of what to say during the lecture. HN was really helpful to find articles and videos (especially https://anders.com/blockchain/) but now I'm more struggling to find what to do during the practicals. If it is possible, I'd like to create a tiny currency, just for exercise, so that they could actually play with it, study the blockchain etc.

Do you have any idea how to do that, or do you have any other good idea ?

Thank you :)

7 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] thread
kleer001
No one is going to (or should) do your homework for you.
lodart
That is not what I ask :) I'm only gathering ideas, from a competent community ; that fits completely in this homework frame. Moreover, I don't ask you to write this lesson for me. I'm more interested in "if it were for you, what would you like to do ?" What could be a good or efficient or fun way to learn the Blockchain ?
kleer001
Fun? Maybe an illustration into the Byzantine General's problem.

But efficient? I think it's a complicated enough idea that it'll require a bit to outline the problem it solves and then longer how it goes about solving it.

quickthrower2
How about having some students be the nodes

Their job is to write down the transactions on a piece of paper.

Then have some students be miners.

They write down unconfirmed transactions and roll 2 dice. If they get a pair of 1's they can create a block and give it to the node students to copy. (Could use a photocopier to speed things up)

Then have some students be users creating transactions and such like.

foopod
I really like this approach. I like too include physical interactions in all the facilitation that I do, it makes the concept super clear.

Try to cover all the possible scenarios when you are planning it out, what happens when multiple miners create a block at nearly the same time?

Be sure to grab a few friends and test it out first, try to predict what kind of questions people might ask.

Good Luck!

Jtsummers
Use physical objects like game tokens and a tray to represent blocks. Faster than handwriting or photocopying. Simple playing cards can also work (this "block" has 4 transactions, the AH, 2S, 3C, 10H).

Someone shuffles a handful of decks together, this creates the feed of transactions going into the network. "Blocks" are created by grabbing a random set of recent open transactions and rolling dice, like you suggest. Pair of ones and that "block" can be passed on to all the other nodes. Others can continue "mining" if they want and try to create a fork, other miners may choose to base their work on the newest block.

Have some sorted stacks of cards or tokens available to quickly assemble copies of the blocks and transactions.