Earlier this December I made this post.Special Thanks to BlackHatCoiner & LoyceV for providing some amazing resources.After reading all of the stellar suggestions, this is what my class did on the last day before the holiday break:Before the lesson could even take place, I needed to get about 10 loaner laptops from the schools library. I had to get these a couple of days beforehand so that could configure electrum on all of the laptops. I had to make made sure that all of the electrum instances were configured to run on the testnet. I then proceeded to add tBTC to all of the wallets configured. This took a lot longer than I anticipated due to me overcompensating how much tBTC I put in each wallet. Afterall, these wallets would need to have 6 lessons worth of tBTC. (Ended up only being 5 lessons because 6th Period wanted to act like apes.)
The morning of the lesson, I loaded all of the testnet wallets and opened channels for each. I had to do this very early in the morning as I wanted to allow enough time for the channels to open. I wanted to use the channels electrum suggested as I was hoping I could get the students to exchange some tBTC toward the end of the lesson. I tried to ensure all channels had a 50/50 capacity but was unable to with a couple for some reason.
When students entered the room 10 laptops were evenly placed across my classroom. As they were walking in, I would assign them a laptop to go to. I average about 26 students per class, so I was able to get 2-3 per laptop.
After watching the
"What is Bitcoin?" video from bitcoin dot org as well as a quick tutorial on how to use electrum (dear god), we began the lesson.
The instructions were simple:
1- Visit this website:
https://starblocks.acinq.co/2- Once in the store, go ahead and order you and your partner coffee! Once you have added that to your cart, go and find another group in the classroom and take their order as well!
3- Once you have a complete order. Click checkout!
4- When you get your Lightning Invoice, copy your invoice address and paste it into your electrum wallet. After double-checking you have the right amount, go ahead and send your bitcoin!
5- Now you and your partner are going to do the same thing except this time, you're going to get yourself enough coffee for the week! After successfully purchasing that order, now get yourself enough coffee for an entire MONTH! Make sure you get enough!
6- Once you have completed all of your purchases, go on the class Microsoft Teams Chat and exchange invoices with any group in the classroom. This is your opportunity to send some bitcoin to any one of your classmates. Make sure you don't send your entire balance! (Plenty of them did.)
7- Once you have finished, add up all of your bitcoin transactions you made this class period to determine the amount of bitcoin you started with.
Prior to the lesson, I was unsure of how much time this would take. I was very concerned that this lesson would only take about 20 minutes to complete. As it turned out, the lesson took the entire class for most classes to complete. Some of my advanced classes were able to complete the lesson rather quickly. Some of my students who had taken an interest in bitcoin well before the lesson had a very easy time with it.
Most importantly, though, the students had a blast. There were a few fires I had to put out late in the day as wallets started to become more and more lopsided balance wise. I had a couple students place some outrageously large orders that drained one of the wallets. I also had a problem with a couple of the channels, but those were quite easy to mitigate.
Aside from that, I cant wait to do this lesson again!
