by James | Jan 13, 2023 | Donations, SteamBeans, SteamHead Spaces
Solar panels are a way for an individual to create a tradable commodity: electricity. It often goes unappreciated that even a middle school student is able to create a tradable commodity. And we are not talking about growing a few grains of rice and eating it at home; electricity can be traded for money by any anonymous person with a computer, the internet, and some electricity. In terms of educational philosophy – energy independence is a pillar of the systems thinking that we teach to students of middle school and up. That could be literally electricity, like it is in this case, but it also includes time, money, and even motivation. Esoteric, perhaps, but we can also boil it down to “creating what you want”. In the end we are all required to do so, we are just not taught many ways to accomplish the tasks, nor given many explanations about the systems behind energy.
Exerting your personal preferences is a tough skill for students to gain personal advancement from, because they rarely have support and mentor-ship in discovering their preferences. MakeFashion Edu excels at that. But once you are able to set your own course, knowing the rules of the system is key.
the craigslist posting for our used solar panels
The goal is for students to gain experience with the energy economy by remotely controlling the orientation, storage, and expenditure of energy. Enter: our desert solar panel project!
In 2020 Hot Purple Energy, a solar installer in Palm Springs, California, donated 4 solar panels to kick off our project. We quickly grew it finding a company on Craigslist that had removed old but working panels, and was selling them for a great price.
Our desert land has lots of sun, so why not let our students have access to it? We were teaching 100% remotely at the time as well!
Our progress, in brief, is that our solar and DIY batteries are running and online, but still need an orientation motor system. We currently let students choose from several fixed orientations. Also, the energy gets consumed by our computers in San Francisco, so it’s not the same “electrons” (but also, it never is), and we keep a ledger to account for it.
If any teachers would like to know more, feel free to contact me, and I’ll also be posting details about the batteries, inverter, etc!
by James | Sep 7, 2022 | JamesEd, SteamBeans
I recently taught a lesson on quadratic voting to my middle school students. Understanding non-traditional political and economic systems is important to me, because I think it creates better world citizens. These topics should be baked into lessons throughout K-12.
In this lesson, each student was given 10 votes that they could use to vote on a virtual field trip destination. The voting was conducted using the quadratic voting method, which allows individuals to assign more weight to their votes by using more votes. Here is an awesome tool – https://quadraticvote.co/ – to quickly run a quadratic vote, but I recommend going in-depth with your students on various voting methods if you have time.
One of the virtues of learning quadratic voting is that it allows for a more nuanced representation of individual preferences. Rather than simply stating a preference for one option over another, individuals can express the intensity of their preference by using more votes. This is lauded as allowing for a more accurate representation of the collective will of the group. I love it because it causes voters to see multiple sides of an issue: you aren’t always for or against something, but rather have a gradient of pros and cons to consider within yourself. (Sidenote, this is what I love about calculus, it improves your ability to make decisions weighing in your various emotions and time values).
Politically, quadratic voting can help to mitigate the influence of “swing voters” who may hold disproportionate power in traditional voting systems. By requiring individuals to use more votes in order to exert greater influence, quadratic voting helps to ensure that the outcome of the vote reflects the preferences of the majority rather than a small number of individuals.
Overall, the lesson on quadratic voting was a valuable learning experience for my students, as it taught them the importance of accurately expressing their preferences and the value of considering the preferences of others.
references:
- Vitalik explaining quadratic funding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssr0CHg6YSE
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting
- A simple tool to conduct a vote: https://quadraticvote.co/ (though personally I made a shared excel file so we could all see the entire process)
credits:
- Words: M. James on the keyboard
- Image: R. Thufir jamming with Diffusion Bee for the image
by James | Oct 7, 2021 | Carrie, JamesEd, SteamBeans
A SteamHead member and teacher managed a grade 5 makerspace class, and her students learned some financial literacy through using nano cryptocurrency.
For those who aren’t familiar, nano allows for fast and low-cost transactions, and is very cheap to purchase so the real-world fiat value is not as impactful on students as physical money might be. I thought it was a great tool to teach her students about financial concepts like budgeting, saving, and investing. Interesting to me – she did not hold lectures on these topics specifically, but rather blended them into her regular plans (if any of Carrie’s plans could ever be referred to as “regular”!).
To get started, she gave each student a regular and equal amount of nano to use as “payment” for classroom supplies. As her class was in a makerspace and focused on building projects, these supplies were important for students to obtain. Want more glitter for your cardboard racecar? Gotta check the pricelist.
Initially, the students could only use their nano to purchase supplies from the class shelf, and actually kept the balances on a paper list instead of doing real transactions. But after a week, she introduced a classroom bank which paid interest on deposits. To manage her time, she also started offering jobs to a few students who were responsible for running the bank, which paid a salary in nano. The concept of wallets was introduced, and the few kids who knew them were responsible for updating balances. For some 11 years olds, it was a piece of cake. For others, they wanted nothing to do with it.
After a month, she added another layer to the environment by charging “rent” for desks. This gave the students another expense to manage and helped them understand the concept of fixed costs. She also started allowing the students to transact with each other, rather than just with her as the teacher.
By the end of the semester, the students had gained a solid understanding of financial concepts and were using them in the pursuit of their projects. It was so rewarding to see how engaged and excited they were about learning about personal finance.
Guess where they did most of their work? The floor! No rent for floorspace! I wasn’t there but I imagine there was literal shouts of joy when they figured that one out, it must have been chaos! I wonder if anyone was already locked into desk contracts?
Overall, using nano as a teaching tool was a great success. It allowed the students to understand financial concepts in a practical and hands-on way, and I’m so SO confident that the skills they learned will serve them well in the future.
by James | Jun 16, 2021 | JamesEd, SteamBeans
John Dewey felt that education environments should be democratic, in order to give a democrat nation it’s best citizens. This made me consider informing my educational philosophy with my latest thoughts on democracy. Recent events in the US have made me consider alternatives to “first past the post” voting systems, and “non-proportional representation”. To me, these are USA voting processes that could be improved to make our nation more democratic.
So, what did this mean for my virtual reality galleries for students, with a cryptocurrency driven auctioning system for the best gallery spaces?
Initially we tried making group decisions about the gallery space. Would it be a building, a natural gallery like a park, or something abstract like a tunnel of light? Hearing everyone’s voice on the matter was quite challenging, and making group decisions on those ideas was even harder! Simple shows of hands didn’t work well because we had too many options and each student usually liked more than one option.
I found inspiration on an article from Vitalik Buterin called “Quadratic Payments“. In it he specifies some voting techniques that I found quite attractive, and genuinely feel would be an improvement for a democratic voting system. Thus, in class, we used Quadratic Voting! This is a system of voting where you get multiple votes, but must pay an increasing amount for each vote. Each student got to spend 10 nano, and 1 vote cost just 1 nano, 2 votes cost 3 nano, 3 votes cost 6 nano, and 4 votes cost 10 nano.
Check out my Google Sheets Quadratic Voting Template (disclaimer, I made this during class, it’s not fantastic, but got the job done). First, we recorded our votes on this sheet (I know, it could benefit from being anonymous). Then we calculated how many nano each student spent on their votes, and they sent that back to our class wallet. Someday maybe we’ll use the Bitcoin Lightning Network and Satoshis, but for now it’s all nano.
I wanted to embed the votes into the transactions, and I think I could have done it by making a wallet for each vote, but I wasn’t sure how to enforce the increasing cost of each vote into the transaction. Maybe some type of app could help with this?
I also think a Quadratic Microsoft Forms would be very useful, so that this style of voting could be used as quickly and commonly as a show of hands, embedding it into the thinking processes of my students. Hit me up @JamesLearns on Twitter if you have any recommendations!
by James | Dec 26, 2020 | Great Projects, SteamBeans
In September 2020, James reached out to the Reddit cryptocurrency channels for advice about using crypto in a classroom. A “nano” advocate from the Netherlands convinced him of the currency and walked him through setting up wallets and an initial exchange (and donated some nano to the students!). With this setup, the pandemic continued and James’ real-life class scheduled was cancelled and another phase of online learning was planned. James wondered, “How can we use nano in online classes?”
Over October and November, James introduced students to a virtual reality world called Mozilla Hubs, where they could interact digitally. Students displayed art, learned their “abilities” in the world like flying, helped each other figure everything out, and generally interacted very well without the verbal abuse, trolling, or pranks normally seen in online spaces.
In December, James introduced a static map, a fixed set of worlds the students came to for class activities. This scarcity of space and storage of resources created a market, where students verbally negotiated for areas to host their conversations (voice chat is proximity based, you can only hear avatars near your avatar) and to display their assignments.
Seeing the “market” at the end of the year James introduced the nano currency into the space, and sent students private keys along with an introduction to exchanging nano. He created a billboard of possible values for spaces, and called out how the existing “classroom agreement” (a list of rules that James and his students created together) applied to nano transactions, highlighting that ethical behavior should continue to guide everyone’s actions.
Stay tuned to see the results of this experiment, or follow on Twitter @JamesLearns
by James | Dec 28, 2018 | James, JamesEd, SteamBeans
My students get exposure to the concepts I have learned about as a result of my cryptocurrency studies. I find “financial sovereignty” very relatable to “self agency”, which is (the most?) an important element in motivating students. John Dewey progressive education essays and Standford’s “Design Thinking” process have been my favorite references, but the realm of knowledge covered in crypto educational media is a worthy contender.
We have used crypto currency for purchasing display space in a virtual museum, as quadratic voting tokens, and more. Many of these activities do not rely upon crypto, but rather use it as an additional tool in order to bring more learning into the lessons. Blockchain Storytelling did not use any crypto, but rather I formulated my class discussion points very differently, and with new terms, because of my exposure to crypto currency media (YouTubes and podcasts). Because of the philosophy behind these concepts, I feel a need to expose my students to some of the terms and perspectives that I find.
The summary of Blockchain Storytelling: using an online forum, we collaboratively wrote stories with the author changing every sentence. A “fork” was established when two people responded to the same sentence. There were many one sentence forks that never got sustained. Each student had a pseudonym, but was KYC’d with me. Check out the fork below which for awhile resulted in boys and girls having separate chains. Later they would invade each other’s story chains, as I sat back and laughed all the way to the teacher karma bank (where I was stacking points for making writing fun). A short selection for your enjoyment:
- purple_dragon: Once upon a time I grew wings.
- minecraft: they were on my but
- formula1: when I fart I blow it into your face!!
- _*evelyn*_: I could fly through the mountains and visit my friends in other cities whenever I wanted.
- purple_dragon: Nobody else had wings, so it was up to me to make sure all of my friends were okay, because the internet had gone out everywhere, for months.
For the forum, we used Reddit! Turns out you can create your own personal Reddit from Github. I was lucky enough to have a volunteer grant my students access to his server for the lessons. I opted out of setting my own up or having a reddit account for every student. It probably would have taken more time that I was willing to put into the project. So we used a centrally managed server whose owner I knew but none of the students knew. Similar to exchanges I feel! Importantly, we discussed the concept as a class – who controlled what, who knew what, and what options they had for creating their own servers. I did not actually mention what Reddit was, only Github.
The stories were, as expected, fantastic and numerous. There was a lot of junk, and my KYC powers helped make moderation easy. An interesting bit about moderation: in the official school chat system, students cannot edit or delete anything they type. In this system they could, and I told them that they must not edit or delete. In fact, they did edit and delete, proving that trust doesn’t go far especially when making a tiny edit genuinely improved the “story chain”.
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