Hands on Introduction to Bitcoin in colleges and universities until now touched only upon the theoretical aspects of the cryptocurrency technology. The history of digital currency and its theoretical aspects are important nevertheless but it is also important to train students hands-on in developing them. Stanford University has stepped up in this regard with its latest course offering.
Stanford University has started a lab course covering important aspects of cryptocurrency technology. Started earlier this month, from 4th of January, the course is being taught by the CEO of 21 Inc., Balaji Srinivasan and Stanford’s Professor Dan Boneh. Spanning over a period of 2 months, the course will cover concepts like digital signatures, blockchain, mining and transactions over the blockchain.
Adopting a hands-on approach means that the students must have some minimum computer knowledge including UNIX, Python, HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc. According to a report carried by one of the digital currency news sites, the course work starts with an introduction to bitcoin computing and micropayments where students will not only learn about digital currency and payment systems, they will also learn how to build and integrate such services on web platforms. The following week, they will demo their product incorporating the things they learnt during the previous week.
Moving on, they will learn how to monetize user generated content on social platforms like Instagram. They will then work on building a product along the same lines in the next week. Students continue to implement their learning into products until February 22 when they will start learning about command line program outsourcing of Bitcoin Linux codes on the cloud. They will work on creating Google like search engines, Dropbox cloud storage etc. while monetizing with bitcoin along the way.
By the end of the course, students will receive their grades based on their overall participation and performance during the course period.