EOYP Lessons
Trying to find a time to host our lessons
Having effectively created a useful teaching resource by way of the app, and written all our lessons, we as a group approached Mr Hamilton following a comprehensive Middle School Committee meeting (which coincidentally was about brainstorming ideas for the end of year program, the three days at the end of year when students in the middle school get to participate in activities of their choice). Our initial plan was to host lessons during Middle School Assembly periods, which would have been ideal because we wanted to break our lessons up into different sections pertaining to the different areas of the lessons, but unfortunately staying in remote learning for an extended part of the second half of this year prohibited this from happening, and upon our return to school middle school assembly periods were already blocked up.
It was a possibility to host our lessons during remote learning, but we feel that we wouldn’t have been able to provide the same engaging lesson experience over an online medium, since we wanted a large part of these workshops to be discussion-based and us going around and helping people out. Therefore, we managed to find a compromise with Mr Hamilton; that we could host our lessons during the End of Year Program. Unfortunately that meant we would have to condense a series of lessons into a shorter 2-hour period, but at least we were going to have a chance for people to experience our workshops in person.
At the end of the day, we were quite happy to have been able to make this compromise – the End of Year Program still being a month and a bit away gives us a fair bit more time than we originally thought to finalise the app and lessons, and we still have plenty of time to cover all the content that we want to. Actually, having the programs in the last week of school increases the probability of people coming, because in the tumultuous few last weeks of school, people are going to prioritise getting their work done, and potentially either forget about our sessions or disregard them for more time to get stuff done. With everything finished up, people will be able to kick back and enjoy our lessons.
After our initial discussion with Mr Hamilton, he asked us to put together an official application into the end of year program, which I’ve attached below:
Hi Mr Hamilton,
I hope you’ve had a nice afternoon. As we’ve already discussed, my Community Project group (Garv Shah, Natsuki Rogers and myself) would like to host our in-person lessons/seminars about cryptocurrency and forms of investing during the end of year program. We’ve already seen a large group of students interested in both the topic and in taking the lessons (link to survey results conducted earlier this year), and have begun to formulate our lesson plans and teaching resources (shown below).
Teaching resource
Our teaching resource, for use as a practical demonstration of the knowledge in our lessons, is a simulated trading experience using virtual “money” to give people the experience of investing in cryptocurrencies, similar to the ASX Trading Game held earlier this year. If you would like to try the *work in progress* online version, create an account with your school email and a password of your choice; https://the-nova-system.github.io/nova_app/.
Lesson plans
Our lessons aim to educate students about cryptocurrencies and the technologies that support them, both topics that have become increasingly prevalent as of late despite not many people knowing how they actually work. We will be advising students about the dangers of investing in such a volatile sector, and not providing any financial advice per se, rather educating people about what cryptocurrencies are and how they are traded. Our lessons include analogies about how cryptocurrencies work to make it simple for anybody interested to understand, talk about some of crypto’s prevalence in the news lately and how it’s impacting our society, a broader breakdown of how regular investing and the economy work, the benefits of cryptocurrency over traditional currency, and the technological advancements made through blockchain. Hopefully these will give students a proper and balanced insight into the wider topics around cryptocurrency.
Thank-you for considering our project idea as an event for the End of Year Program.
Kind regards,
Liam Shaw
Thankfully, our application went through and we now have the clear to host our lessons during the End of Year Program!