Bitcoin Forum

So after tipping my kid's teachers with Bitcoin during Teacher Appreciation Week (http://"https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=78826.msg877572#msg877572"), I have been invited to come to school this Friday and indoctrinate the little skulls full of mush to the wonders of Bitcoin.

Here is the flier I'm handing out during the class.

https://i.imgur.com/3jlX0.png

Prior to the class, I'll be writing in some Coin4.me short URLs to some instawallets with a few bitcents for the kids to play with.

During the class, I'll give them the general idea of Bitcoin, show them how to move bitcoins around from wallet to wallet, and invite them to trade them for crafts (or whatever they can think of) and then I'll give the teacher some ideas for some kind of report in a week or two to discuss what they learned and how they used it.

This is great!

Getting schools involved would be a giant leap for Bitcoin. I'm going to send my school administrators an email today. I could be paying for lunch in Bitcoins in a few days :D

You go bro! I feel like I have learned a lot about money via bitcoin. In school I don't remember being told anything about money.  :-\

Bravo! This is great news. I'm sure these kids will spread information of bitcoins like wildfire!

My kid told me today that the whole class was abuzz of getting "free money" lol... They are very excited.

Lucky generation! They just might get their free money.

Well done!

Flyer looks good too - although I think the stuff about one sending millionth of a bitcoin might be stretching it just a tad (when the standard client will ask you to pay a 0.0005 fee). :)

...How old are these kids?

4th grade. Depending on how I develop this "intro", I suspect that this particular school will be encouraging me to to this for other higher grades. It is like a charter technology/science themed school and are hungry to be "on the cutting edge". They are asking me to help out with their lego mindstorms club, and get them going with stuff like Scratch from MIT, etc.

Given that this is a 4th grade class...

What questions do you think I should suggest to the teacher for an extra credit report after the demo? I'm thinking like a week later so they have some time to play with it and barter with their classmates for crafts and such...

Here's what I got so far:

Do you have more or less Bitcoins now after bartering with your friends, family, and classmates?

What goods or services did you produce to get more Bitcoins?

What goods or services did you buy with your Bitcoins?

Did you barter with anyone who wasn't your classmate? Who?

How do you think Bitcoin can make the world a better place?

What is the most interesting thing you learned about Bitcoin?

What is "the BlockChain" and why is it important to Bitcoin?

It might be a bit too much for 4th graders, but I would love it if you were able to add up all the bitcoins in the closed group and (and this is the important bit) the value of all the goods and services that group bought.

We will fully expect that at the start of the week there will be just your seed money (let's say 10 BTC), and at the end there will be the seed money (in different hands) plus all the services the children purchased from each other. "You see kids, we have ended up with more than we started with".

e.g. Billy Smith drew a picture for Betty Jones and was paid 0.01 BTC.  She still has the picture worth 0.01 BTC and Billy still has the 0.01 BTC.  Total: 0.02 BTC.  Magic.

I wish someone had explained that fundamental magic of free trade to me when I was young.  For far too long I thought economies were zero-sum.

This is brilliant! Do you have a tip jar for this? I'd like to give few BTCs to kids.

Nothing specific for this, but if it's successful in the classroom and I do more, I'll set something else up.

If you want to contribute to my "general fund", there's links in my sig. I do lots of donation worth causes like TOR exit operations, and giveaways through BitcoinWeekly.info and Coin4.me.

Anything would be appreciated.

There is so much you could do with this. The kids could even start a business. Remember when Naferio used BTC with his students in China?

Totally... I'm probably going to have to save that for the high school edition though ;)

I hope this is inspiring others here to do this with their kids/school.

Network Effect, Gentlemen!  :-*

..."so nobody can spent it without your permission."

^^ Just something I caught that you might want to fix.
"
My honest critique:  I think this flyer would be suitable for middle-school level, but it's going to be a lot for 4th graders.  Skimming through this, these are some words for which I think a nice explanation (perhaps using easy examples?) would be helpful for the kids:

1)  "pre-defined" mathematical rules (possible examples of a mathematical rule might be lining up from tallest to shortest)
2)  "'open source software"  (example:  you share your work in front of the class so you can get feedback on it)
3)  "true global democratic majority"  (Example:  voting in class for an activity by raising their hand)
4)  "encrypt"  (Example:  secret codes...maybe pig latin vs. English)
5)  "client"  (something or someone that works for someone else...the Bitcoin program works for them)

Thank you! I'll make the corrections and suggestions. I threw this flier together very quickly for the teacher when she stated she needed to get parent attendance permission before Friday. I will call upon the Bitcoin hive mind when we do this again for the next class.

Oh, and the only reason I'm doing this for 4th graders is because my kid "gets it" and prefers them over fiat for their allowance. I totally expect this to go over much better with higher grades.

2.5BTC sent.

Cheers.

Bitcoins for allowance = awesome parenting!

I merely suggested it, but I think I have created a monster.. you should hear them complain when they have to spend them low and receive them high. Often I (jokingly) threaten to take their Bitcoins away if they don't get As and Bs or something and they start screaming NOOOOoooo lol

Good stuff!

Thank you sir!!!

You'll see it show up on the operating expense report at the end of this month.

does this forum support buzz-word-alerts? how do i set them up?

http://www.google.com/alerts

:( not. Can't narrow it down to the forum, can I?

But more on topic: I could imagine kids trading their bitcoins like they traded stickers. Especially in countries where they all have smart phones. I love the idea :)

Anything you can do in a google search, you can do in a google alert... so add "site:bitcointalk.org" and you should be good to go.

ah. me stupid.

Just curious, what do they spend their bitcoins on?

When I was in 4th grade, I wanted things like foam airplanes, and candybars.  :)

Sheesh are you the coolest mofo around or what?  Inspiring  :)

Probably Silk Road.

We must of been raised differently I wanted an AK  :)

Guys... I cannot express that a huge smashing success this presentation was. It knocked my socks off..

https://i.imgur.com/trHqA.jpg

The kids had so many questions... Three really kinda shocked me... (paraphrasing..)

#1: When you send Bitcoins around the world, do they go up through a satellite and back down the other side?

I stumbled on this one for a little bit because I wasn't prepared to teach 4th graders about asymmetric eliptical curve cryptogaphy and message hashing. LOL.. They put me on the spot, so I dont recall exactly how I answered. Something about the Bitcoins dont really "go" anywhere, you're just using cryptographic keys to sign off amounts everyone knows you have. Sigh.

#2: What happens if you don't want a Bitcoin address anymore? Can you just delete it?

Wow. Um, well you can forget it exists and never use it again... I somehow got into the example of being able to create thousands of keys at a time and delete those and a little about how it relates to being anonymous.

#3: Can you make Bitcoin addresses anything you want (besides those long ugly strings)?

I told them about VanityGen and being able to specify a string of text you want in your keys when you create them.

There were so many more really awesome questions, but it's all a blur now.

But the bottom line, I think I've found a new passtime and audience. The teacher was equally impressed and I'm positive this will get around to the rest of the faculty and I'll be invited back to do it with other classes from 4th through 12th.

Getting bombarded with all these questions from little skulls full of mush was an outrageously exciting experience. MOAARRR!!

Nice blocky blur, looks like their faces are mush too. ;D

next time you do something like that please record the audio - especially of the questions :) would love to hear it..

Maybe you guys aren't parents, or haven't been paying attention to the news lately, but recording kids is an order of magnitute more lethal than recording police officers in public or public buildings. Sorry, but unfortunately, that's pretty much not going to happen.

Hey just get ready for when you get this speech in Congress you will get asked a lot of the same questions  :D

LOL... You see, the Bitcoins are transferred up to satellites via a series of tubes...

Tipped you a coin. This is awesome!

I remember as a youth (maybe 2nd grade) we went on a field trip to the local bank and they taught us how to fill out checks which we then cashed and bought ice cream with on the way back to school.

You are an idiot. So I guess teaching kids math is cultish too? Die in a fire.

When I was a kid, a large bank got class time to come and indoctrinate us into the way of banking.
It was a bit of a scam - because the special 'kids' bank accounts they gave us were insulated from reality by not having fees.
It came as a bit of a shock as a teenager to find my few dollars whittled away. I wish they'd just been honest from the outset.

Similarly - I cringe when people promote Bitcoin as 'no fees'.  We need to be upfront about it. Especially to kids. They remember little dishonesties like that - and might hate bitcoin like I hate the banks for it!

Nice job, Broseph.

If you can't even pay the fee with a unit of currency we're all use to, then I can't with a straight face say there are any fees. The typical transaction fees are currently less than a penny and un payable with our current financial system - so there really is no context. Yes, there is a fee, but the breath you exhale speaking of it is almost worth more than the fee itself. Now, having said that, I eventually get around to explaining the fee part when they are at the level of intelligently discussing the lower level blockchain discussions.

Find a bank with no account maintenance fees - problem solved (well one, anyway).


Well you can say "really really low fees", "less than a penny fees", "statistically insignificant fees", but absolutely none of those are the same as "no fees", which is what a lot of Bitcoiners are parroting around, and it is wrong.

Amazing job!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_WMpSC7nK3os/SA7YaZWF_oI/AAAAAAAABg0/AycrGlHOIMQ/s400/hillary-thumbs.jpg

For any non-trivial amount; miners will include the transaction with no fee.

Some miners will accept any transaction at all (although I forget which pool it is).  So it's not wrong at all (it just might take a looooong time to get that small transaction into a block).

It might be wrong one day; but it's not now -- so what's the problem?

Well, you can't advertise "no fees" and "faster than traditional banking" at the same time. You might not have been around, but there have been times at which no-fee transactions where piling up for multiple days (in the hundreds) and no miner was including them because the space reserved by the vanilla satoshi client (back then everyone just used that) was not big enough for the non-fee transactions being inserted by an attacker (if I recall correctly).

It's not much of a payment system if you can't expect your transactions to go through at some point. Without a fee, you can't, so I agree with previous poster that saying bitcoin transactions "are free" is false.

In my mind the much more compelling reasons for using bitcoin is its properties as a money, not as a payment system anyway ;)

Hey OP, did you talk about the kids about fractional reserve banking or touch that at all?

The closest I got was "usually governments and law makers have been tasked with creating money and defining its value and how it is used, but bitcoin has a predefined set of rules that can only be changed by all its users in every country around the world..." Anything more than that, and I feel I would have got the deer-in-the-headlights stare. I think that's probably a topic for grades 9-12.

Now that I have a basic syllabus, I plan on going over it in more detail with a teacher from each grade and developing a grade specific version.

Explaining fractional reserve banking to anyone is hard because the underlying concept is retarded. It's amazing that it isn't considered fraud.

Anyway really cool project and people saying they have nothing to buy with it miss the concept of the project completely. If you let children trade with each other they will form their own economy!

When I was in elementary school I did something similar. We wrote with fountain pens and re-filled them with containers which contained small glass/plastic spheres (bullet) to keep them closed before they were opened. There was a limited (but for all intended purposes indefinite) supply of these little spheres in the class (every time you ran out of ink) and I convinced people to use this to buy things of off each other. I bought things like pens, erasers, pencil sharpeners and let people do my arts and crafts (I also exchanged that for computer tasks on the Windows 3.11 machine lol). I recall some guys tried to trade it for kisses from girls too, I don't really recall if that worked though (prostitution FTW!). This lasted for the last 3 years of elementary school or something. Doing something similar with Bitcoins is far far better (indefinite supply, we actually had inflation and rising prices with the spheres haha).

Given your current project.. this explains your smashing success! hahaha

That's so true. I had troubles understanding the "concept" myself, because it's so stupid, it really can't be, "I must be misunderstanding".

I think the second a child would understand it, they would immediately go: "but that's such an unfair rip-off!"

Oh I wasn't interested back then. Wasting my precious spheres on stupid girls? Outrageous!  ::)

You should really give each kids like 1 BTC, who can successfully download and use the bitcoin client.
1. Free starter drug..BTC
2. First Graders
3. ???
4. profit?

The problem is who's going to fund $150 to a classroom of 25 kids?

It really needs to be about $20 per kid because its impossible to buy anything remotely useful or novel with anything less, given shipping, etc.

I think what will make this ridiculously successful is when Charlie gets those Bitcoin Gift cards in the Walmart checkout stands. Then anyone you show this too will immediately realize that it is useful AND readily available.

Actually I think it would be better to give them very little and encourage them to trade between themselves for a week. If you give them real world useful amounts they'll spend it and be done.

I'm reaching out to many leaders of education related projects, I think we should work together:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=632905.msg7047919#msg7047919