Blockchain na Escola: Web3 Education for Brazil’s Public School Students

Blockchain na Escola (Blockchain at the School, in English) is a non-profit organization that seeks to bring web3 education to public school students and social movements in Brazil.

The first pilot was in the city of Serra, state of Espirito Santo, one of the most violent cities in Brazil, and you can check the results here.

Since then, our team has been growing and what was just an idea became a reality. We’re currently building a curriculum tailored for the public Brazilian classrooms.

We’re testing this new curriculum, our MVP, by training teachers so they can provide our content in the classroom.

That should allow us to gain scale faster, while limiting our costs and empowering teachers to replicate and adapt the content in multiple classrooms.

While education remains a hot topic in web3, we’re the only project totally focused on building content to be delivered in the public schools in Brazil.

This kind of massive access leaves us with the opportunity to spearhead the ReFi narrative while onboarding these new users to web3.

Our goal is to enable students to build their own web3 social and environmental projects - and other ventures as well -, preparing the soil for them to develop regenerative economies at the local level.

We’re currently holding conversations with public authorities to deliver the content to whole states in Brazil.

We’re already partnering with 5 schools and 2 social movements in Salvador (Bahia), Nova Lima (Minas Gerais) and Rio de Janeiro, where we should be able to impact around 300 students until the end of this semester and +1,000 until the end of the year.

What We’ve Delivered so Far

Our project was founded by Marcelo Silva, where he taught a classroom of 40 students and achieved +30K completions in our online modules at 101.xyz.

In December 2022, Ariel Leite led the project to a fresh start with a proposal of a MVP that gained the attention of Prezenti, a Celo VC. We received a grant that allowed the project to hire a team that could fulfill our educational ambitions.

In January, we drew our strategy and mapped potential partners and schools. From February to March we became fully operational and started connecting with schools. We prefer to approach them slowly so we can understand the local reality and adapt our content accordingly.

Our careful approach paid off and we’re already receiving tons of recommendations. In this short time span, we’ve accomplished:

• Presented our project to 8 schools
• Conducted workshops with 4 groups of teachers
• Presented in an open event for students at the Colégio Central (Salvador), one of the most traditional public schools in the city
• Scheduled workshops with 10 classrooms (starting May 2nd)
• Attended the Cripto Connect event in Salvador as a partner project
• Were invited to present in the Creativity and Innovation Festival (FIC), hosted by the Instituto Anísio Teixeira (in charge of teacher training in Bahia)

The results we’re collecting this semester will allow us to improve our content, teacher training methodology and course portfolio, making us prepared for expansion starting in July.

Educational Methodology

Teachers and schools can select between our three course formats:

Besides the format, teachers can also pick one of the following themes: Environment, Equality and Arts.

Our teaching methodology takes students to learn about the fundamentals of blockchain technology and how other projects are leveraging its capabilities to solve real world problems.

We select projects to address during class based on the chosen theme and provide hands-on activities for students to learn actively.

Based on the success of the 101.xyz experiment, we have also created short educational content for students to complete on their own. You can check our modules here.

Our goal is to provide a gamified experience to incentivize students to keep up their learning with the $NOS educational token (no financial value) and NFT badges (as they progress through the game levels).

We initially planned to limit the activities to students, but will make the activities public on May 2nd to educate a larger audience. That will also allow us to collect results and improve the content faster.

Community

It is also worth mentioning that we’re heavily invested in building a community with not only web3 and web2 projects, but also researchers, teachers and social leaders.

That’s also a core part of our expansion strategy. We’ve already piloted it with the EuAmoMinhaQuebrada social movement in the Morro do Papagaio favela in Minas Gerais through our partnership with Blcktopia.

We’ll also reach students in Rio de Janeiro through our partnership with Educar+. These initial experiences will also allow us to build a framework to onboard new partners to support our course expansion in 2H2023.

We plan to dedicate 40% of our funding request to our partners to show them how web3 is changing the funding game forever.

Our community is concentrated in the Northeast region, which could also allow us to expand the web3 footprint in a historically underserved part of Brazil.

Scaling our Project: 60% of grant proceeds

Project Expansion

For the second semester, we want to expand to at least 5 additional states in Brazil, reaching +1,000 through the course of the semester.

As mentioned, we’ll focus on the North and Northeast regions, which have lower economic development and a higher concentration of indigenous and black people than the South and Southeast, where the majority of the web3 industry is currently located.

The rationale is to expand the web3 frontier in Brazil while incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at the core of our organization.

As we grow, we’ll also be laying the foundation to decentralize Blockchain na Escola’s management, so the community can gradually take the wheel to guide the organization.

That reinforces the need for us to incorporate DEI policies in our expansion strategy, to make sure we’re onboarding new leaders that’ll continue to represent the underserved communities we’re intentionally approaching.

Building a Robust Course Portfolio

Our MVP portfolio prioritizes ReFi themes that have high demand from teachers and schools. However, there are other important themes in high demand in public schools that we’d like to explore.

Going forward, we’d like to onboard two additional teachers to the team to support us in training more teachers to expand our reach and to build a more robust course portfolio that can meet additional needs we’ve identified from schools.

We’ve selected themes that could allow us to further capacitate the next generation of web3 builders. Hence, for the second semester we’d like to include the following:

• Exponential technologies: artificial intelligence and blockchain
• Introduction to web3 programming
• Product development and design thinking for web3 projects

Investing on Technology to Improve Gamification

As mentioned above, we’re testing our hypothesis that gamification can be a powerful driver to incentivize students to learn about blockchain technology.

The results we’re collecting will guide our decisions on how to properly tune the gamification to attract more students and improve learning results.

Provided we confirm our initial hypothesis, we plan to prototype an educational dapp in the second semester.

Our dapp will be lightweight and will run on the browser given limitations with internet bandwidth and phone memory for most students.

It’ll also allow us to introduce additional gaming features to increase students' emotional response to the game, which has been proved to be a major factor in knowledge learning and retention.

For our first prototype, we plan to include:

• Avatar creation, including cultural elements from African-Brazilian culture
• At least 2 Brazilian landscapes as the game scenario (one urban and one rural)
• At least 10 in-game levels
• At least 1 co-op game mode, where we reward students that cooperate
• At least 3 career paths that students can explore to prepare for their professional career

During the initial 6 months after deployment, we expect our dapp to reach:

• 1000+ unique users
• 100 monthly active users
• 50 daily active users
• 3000 completed activities
• Host 2 in-game events

We’re also partnering with AgroForest DAO on the Redemption Land metaverse project, which is currently focused in agroforest teaching. The collab is focused on two fronts: educational content and student reach.

Ecosystem Development: 40% of grant proceeds

Educational Projects

We quickly figured out that scaling web3 education in Brazil is not a mission for a single project. Luckily, there are a lot of awesome initiatives that are targeting education with a variety of methodologies.

We’ll use 40% of the grant proceeds to create a community fund that can be accessed by these partners. The goal is to accelerate blockchain education across multiple target groups.

We’d like to list them here to showcase our partner network in the education space:

• Play4Change
• Educar+
• Blcktopia
• Neduc Coroadinho
• Elias Eduardo
• Athena Metaverso

Community and Product Development

We’re also looking beyond educational projects in order to foster the North/Northeastern web3 ecosystem.

Our experience at Cripto Connect showed us how powerful an event can be in putting together multiple minds to solve real world problems using blockchain.

Our goal is to also use the ecosystem development funds to help drive the community’s growth along with its creator David Costa.

David has already put together an awesome community and we’re looking to build up on his efforts to make sure it can continue to grow and generate impact. More funds also means more events so we can onboard more people to web3 – here, again, we’re prioritizing DEI in our inclusion strategy.

Another pillar of our ecosystem development strategy is to cater web2 projects that could leverage blockchain technology.

We’re actively seeking such projects and helping to educate and inspire them to use web3 capabilities to bring transparency, speed and immutability to their apps.

On that front, the most notable opportunities we’ve identified are Ayabese, an incubator of social projects such as Afro Saúde and Minha Cesta, and Cubos Academy, a startup focused on technological education for underserved communities.