Cardano is an amazing network and community. We would love to see more developers joining us, especially young people.
To encourage people developing in the Cardano ecosystem, we introduce Cardano via an interactive coding tutorial, which is analogous to online scripting learning platforms and Apple Playground. A normal college student can easily get a taste of what is software programming, how the development process goes, what can be done, and how the codes should be written, on the Playground.
To make it fun, there will be a story throughout the whole learning journey. Young people would be able to follow the story to go through the learning process. After they finish the class, they would be able to have a cardano NFT certificate.
Basically, we want to let young people go through the process of no knowledge in blockchain at all to write their first simple smart contract on the Cardano blockchain in a fun way. Thereby increase the number of developers playing on the Cardano blockchain.
We adopt the “get a taste first” approach to lower the entry barrier for potential blockchain developers and encourage them to try out Cardano.
The platform will greatly increase the number of the Cardano developers, especially the new generations, as result in a wider adoption of the technology, and eventually promoting the whole ecosystem growth. Also, the platform will create a new career opportunity for those who want to advocate the blockchain industry, and especially the Cardano ecosystem.
Youngsters using the Playground will be able to:
- Learn basic programming skills
- Learn the foundation of blockchain
- Write codes with result checks
STEM educators using the Playground will be able to:
- Teach programming skills using Haskell
- Teach introductory courses of blockchain (technical parts)
References:
- Near Academy : <https://near.academy/>
- Apple playground for swift : https://www.apple.com/hk/en/swift/playgrounds/
Possible Future Direction:
- Encourage secondary schools to adopt the teaching material in STEM classes or extra curricular activities, which is a common practice in the South East Asia region.
- Certification after attending and passing all online lectures
- Community of alumni from the Cardano Playground
- Discussion board on Cardano Playground (just like the community of https://leetcode.com)
We will be able to address the following key metrics of the challenge:
- Filling in gaps defined in the exploration stage.
- Number of developers actively building on top of Cardano
- A sense of community and conversations. Having people around to talk with.
We are a platform for young people to have a taste of Cardano even they do not have any blockchain knowledge when they are still exploring. We hope that via a fun experience, they would join the Cardano space as developers.
Via discussion boards, they can also discuss what's a better solution like what happened in the communities on https://leetcode.com
Challenge 1: Take time to do user testing to make difficult knowledge easy to understand to young people.
Challenge 2: How to pack knowledge into a storyflow to be engaging enough for young people. Currently the attention timespan of people is becoming shorter and shorter. We need to be engaging enough to catch attention.