Successful use of Hive for teaching blockchain technologies

For the last 3 years, I have tried to use Hive to teach blockchain technologies to computer science and mathematics master students in my university. For that I have created a community, ULille blockchain, where you can see my progress (and my students'). I was not completely satisfied with how it went in the first 2 years but I think I have finally found a nice way to to teach with Hive.

Here is what I did:

1. Ask the students to create an account for themselves. I have managed to get a few account creation tokens and I demonstrate to the class what happens when one creates an account for one of the students. This is when I explain the concepts of key pairs and their different uses in Hive.
2. Delegate 20 HP to each of the students (for 1 year). This is when I explain the different tokens in Hive and their usages.
3. Ask the students to write articles about course related subjects with a strict deadline. The key point that I changed this year is to make this article the main deliverable that is used for the evaluation of the course and ask for a minimum of 600 words. This minimum length of the article is a good indication of the necessary effort for the students. I may increase this length in the future. The last requirement is that their article has to include links to their sources.
4. In class, the students present their article in a few minutes before the deadline. This allows me to comment on their work and other students to ask questions and get exposure to all subjects. Thus the final article is of better quality, I think, and all students in the class have an interest to read their colleagues' articles for more details and an access to the source material.
5. Write a summary article listing all the submitted articles of the students and post this summary to various related communities: StemSocial and La Ruche (the French speaking community) in my case. Such advertising helps the students to get some visibility and increases their rewards. Obviously this has to be done early in the 7 day voting window after the student article submissions. This is when I explain the various incentives provided by Hive. Here are these summary articles for year 2022:
   • Articles des étudiants du M2 Cloud Computing sur les algorithmes de consensus dans les blockchains
   • Articles des étudiants du M2 Cloud Computing sur les modèles et langages de programmation distribuée
   • Articles des étudiants du M2 mathématiques, finance computationnelle, actuariat
6. Optionally discuss other aspects of Hive and demonstrate them live such as the consensus algorithm with the votes to the witnesses and the dPoS algorithm, the decentralized hive fund, the NFTs with Spinterlands, smart contracts with HBD and hive engine, etc.

This method has provoked a good involvement of the students and sparked their interest about Hive. Most of them managed to earn a few HIVE, and though it is a small amount of money, they liked that. Now, if they want to convert those to € or $, they will have to learn to use exchanges and what that involves in terms of account management and KYC 😄

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