Please describe your proposed solution

We already have working online learning platform (https://danolearn.com) that support coding courses, test & competitions and have been funded in Fund11 for integrating Aiken engine for Aiken code run & test. The project is under good progress and we have released an Aiken course with interactive coding questions, as long as organized certification tests with hundred of developers joined.

This time, we want to make a further step to help to grow the Cardano developer community by preparing a large set (1000+) of Aiken coding problems and organizing regular monthly hackathons. The problems and hackathons would cover various topics in Aiken and smart contract development, including the language fundamentals, useful helper functions, popular smart contract logics, etc…

The problem set will be release daily in form of daily challenges, and we will also publish daily, weekly and monthly dashboards so that everyone can see and get motivation.

The hackathons will be organized monthly with more difficult and well-prepared problems & smart contracts, similar to which we can see in real world applications.

People who rank high in the dashboards or monthly hackathons will be rewards with real ADA. We will use requested fund in this proposal mainly for this purpose.

This problem set, daily challenges & monthly hackathons will motivate developers to engage in smart contract development, and help them to learn the languages and improve problem solving quickly with real word examples.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

Our Aiken problem set, daily challenges with leaderboards & monthly hackathons will boost the Cardano community in many ways:

• It's an easy way to onboard new developers to Aiken smart contract developer pool
• Provides regular activites for all Cardano developers to learn, practice, improve language proficiency
• Helps everyone to stay motivated, engaged and get continously improvement
• Provides large set of reusable Aiken code snippets & helpful functions to resuse in many cases

Measuring Success

We'll track key metrics to gauge impact:

• Number of challenges & hackathons published
• Number of participants joined and pass rate
• User activities & feadbacks

All the problem set, hackathons, and leaderboards will be published publicly on our learning platform (danolearn.com).

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

We have working platform & process, and also have released an interactive Aiken course already at danolearn.com. And we also have very experienced development team both in Web2 and Web3 (danogo.io).

The platform was funded in Fund11 and several tests/hackathons have already organized.

From the development part, we only need to add features to organize the daily challenges and leaderboards. Most of the works for this proposal are for expanding the problem set to much bigger size. We have internal developer team (10+) that can contribute to this already, and we will be looking for external contributors also to speed up the progress.

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1: Milestone 1:Initial problem set (100 Aiken coding problems), leaderboards and first 2 hackathons (1-2) (3 Months)

Milestone outputs:

- Initial problem set (100 Aiken coding problems)

- Public leaderboards on the website (danolearn.com)

- First 2 hackathons (1-2)

Acceptance Criteria:

- 100+ Aiken coding problems published

- Public leaderboards for daily challenges published

- Hackathon #1 and #2 organized, each of which has at least 50 developers joined

- User feedbacks collected and improvements done

Evidence of milestone completion

- All problems publicly accessible on the website, and reports about parcitipants & pass rate of those problems

- Daily/weekly/monthly leaderboards publicly visible on the website

- Report about participants and result of the hackathons

Milestone 2: Milestone 2: Additional Aiken coding problems (problems #101-400), additional 3 hackathons (3-5)

Milestone outputs:

- 300+ Aiken coding problems (problems #101-400)

- Additional 3 hackathons (hackathon #3-5)

Acceptance Criteria:

- 300+ Aiken coding problems published

- Hackathon #3, #4, #5 organized, each of which has at least 50 developers joined

- User feedbacks collected and improvements done

Evidence of milestone completion

- All problems publicly accessible on the website, and reports about parcitipants & pass rate of those problems

- Daily/weekly/monthly leaderboards publicly visible on the website

- Report about participants and result of the hackathons

Milestone 3: Milestone 3: Additional Aiken coding problems (problems #401-700), additional 3 hackathons (6-8) (3 Months)

Milestone outputs:

- 300+ Aiken coding problems (problems #401-700)

- Additional 3 hackathons (hackathon #6-8)

Acceptance Criteria:

- 300+ Aiken coding problems published

- Hackathon #6, #7, #8 organized, each of which has at least 50 developers joined

- User feedbacks collected and improvements done

Evidence of milestone completion

- All problems publicly accessible on the website, and reports about parcitipants & pass rate of those problems

- Daily/weekly/monthly leaderboards publicly visible on the website

- Report about participants and result of the hackathons

Final Milestone: Final Milestone: Final set (problems #701-1000), final hackathon (9-12)

Milestone outputs:

- 300+ Aiken coding problems (problems #701-1000)

- Additional 4 hackathons (hackathon #9-12)

Acceptance Criteria:

- 300+ Aiken coding problems published

- Hackathon #9-12 organized, each of which has at least 50 developers joined

- User feedbacks collected and improvements done

- Release Closeout Report and Project Closeout Video to summary the process and result of the whole project

Evidence of milestone completion

- All problems publicly accessible on the website, and reports about parcitipants & pass rate of those problems

- Daily/weekly/monthly leaderboards publicly visible on the website

- Report about participants and result of the hackathons

- Total report for the whole project

- Report on user feedbacks, improvements and lessons learned

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Tim Nguyen (Technical Architect & Lead), he is also the Tech Lead of the danolearn.com in Fund11

Le Thu Thao (Product Manager & Community Lead)

Our internal developers (10+) to contribute in the problem database.

We will be looking for external contributors to build the problem set and hackathons also.

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

All 80k ADA requested will be used as rewards for content (problem) creators and people with top ranks on leaderboards and Hackathon.

We will cover the cost for development, marketing and operation by ourselves

No dependencies

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

All funding receive will go out to ecosystem to build the open problem set and grow Cardano developers community.