The main thrust of the course is for the students to develop applications for NXT on their own or in groups, and to use those applications to earn more of the cryptocurrency. The students who’ve earned the most additional money at the end of the semester will split a reward of 10,000 NXT for their accomplishments. (Who knew that college could teach real life skills?)...
..."It is up to the students, if they want to earn more NXT, to find a job paid in crypto, build their own business or simply buy them. So this isn’t just an educational course, but also a social experiment with implemented sociological theories."
Sounds pretty cool. I'm sure most of them have probably heard of Bitcoin by now but I doubt there are many people who know about altcoins like NXT yet.
Interesting to note that someone set up the same experiment with Bitcoin too back in its early days. Basically what happened was there was a teacher who set up an assignment where he got his Chinese students to register on this forum and try to earn bitcoins.
Full story and the results from that experiment:
Sorry, mixture of slow and lazy.
3 Classes we're involved, with roughly 80 students per class.
The classes were broken into companies of their own choosing, each company needed a CEO and CFO
And that's all the rules really. The general idea being that they had to do business with foreingers for bitcoin (as at the time only Westerners had bitcoin).
When I started I did have lots of complicated rules, but that just confused everyone, so kept it really basic MUST MAKE BTC, marks given for genuine effort.
The total amount earned by all companies combined was 75btc in a period of about 1 & 1/2 months.
The largest being 31 btc by a single group.
Next being 16btc
10,8....0
There were 17 companies, only 8 of them had any bitcoin at all, the rest got nothing.
I had expected an internal market to develope where companies would specialise and people would be lent from one group to another for a price but nothing like this happened at all.
What did they do?
Apart from spamming the forum and pestering people here are some of the things that we're tried.
Translating Chinese jokes to English
Selling Mp3's and video's about Chinese culture
Making a Chinese cookbook and attempting to sell recipies.
Having a magazine about Chinese medicine
Making two homemade KungFu Movies (which were actually very good but no one bought)
Giving advice on how to enter the Chinese market, open a Chinese bank account etc.
Selling traditional Chinese Medicine advice.
Begging.
The most successful of these was translating jokes, so successful that it convered the majority of bitcoin for the first 3 groups (two of which saw how we it was working and jumped in).
Problems
Language, obviously many of the students could not write a clear advertisement to save their lives.
Understanding bitcoin
Knowing how to use a computer
Having a computer or internet access (most students dont have).
Product ideas.
In roughly the above order.
Of all the students involved about 20 really made an effort or took part. And it seems to be those from this group that are continueing to use bitcoin (after counting they asked for their bitcoin back).
In most ways I would deem this experiment something of a failure, it was poorly executed on my part, and most of my hopes (of developing an internal market inside the college based on bitcoin) came to nothing, but there were some minor success.
Most of the winning companies were in the same class, most of the failing ones were together also, it seems success and failure are contaigous.
Questions?