A Different Perspective

Beginners
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Hi David, Nick and the entire MaidSafe family! :slight_smile:

My name is Chris and I am a state high school teacher from a school near Brisbane, Australia. I just wanted to let you know what part of my typical day at school looks like, and provide you with some hopefully interesting insight that is almost certainly unique.

I arrive at around 7:30 in the morning (classes start at 8:30) to set up my classroom for the day. It doesn’t take long until around 10 or so of the early arriving students show up at the door with the same question every morning, “Have you updated the prices yet?” There is a large screen at the front of the room that permanently displays the price of MaidSafeCoins, with a graph tracking the price in AUD for the past 90 days. I update this manually each day, hence the question as the students don’t like to be left waiting, looking at yesterday’s outdated prices! lol

More students arrive over the next hour and there is a flurry of activity as they discuss the slightest movement in the price, or any relevant updates on the forum. By the time the bell rings for class enough discussion has gone on to give one of your team meetings a run for its money I suspect! :wink: The same thing happens during lunch break, when up to 30 or so students can regularly be found sitting around discussing MaidSafe in the classroom over lunch.

Currently 65 students, mostly Year 11 and 12 (16-17 year olds) have MaidSafeCoin balances that I am aware of, along with several other ex-students and staff. Collectively we would be sitting on over 1 million MaidSafeCoins. We only came onboard after the crowdsale, but we have been consistently accumulating ever since the second half of last year, particularly when the price takes a dip. New students get involved all the time, with some quite literally buying a few MaidSafeCoins with leftover money from their canteen purchases.

We don’t post on the forum (this post will be the first), but we certainly read, and decipher the technical aspects as best we can (we mostly focus on the weekly dev updates). We wait patiently for testnet 3 and have a lot of ideas lined up for how we will approach the beta launch and beyond (as investors and users).

Here are some insights that I would like to share:

  • Teenagers “get it” - they know what this technology could be, and the possible implications for them, and they want in!
  • Interestingly, they find this much easier to understand than Bitcoin (maybe I just explain it better?!?)
  • We are all hugely appreciative of the massive amounts of time and effort the team puts in to get this up and running as quickly as humanly possible, and the underlying intelligence of the concept and the way things are done by the team - David is our hero! (even though we often struggle to understand him through the accent when we watch the YouTube videos of him in interviews and such! hahaha)
  • We check out the Jira Dashboard every day, and hope that one day soon the green line will catch up to the red one! :wink:
  • The students think it is pretty funny when “proper adult investors” are less patient than they are - they don’t understand why everyone is in a such a rush for the price to go up - they like it to stay low because they can buy a lot more the longer it does (they realise they are racing against the clock to accumulate as much as possible as quickly as possible!)
  • The student’s naturally and automatically trade MaidSafeCoins with each other when they don’t have cash on them, without a second thought (imagine when the system is live and it is actually easy to do that!)
  • Their interest in this project and the levels of self-motivation surrounding it is very exciting to witness - they have learnt more about the world of investment and finance (they are getting to be almost expert chart readers!), as well as the other technical learning from the forums and videos surrounding the actual invention itself, than I could ever hope to otherwise teach them.
  • If this is what happens when a group of ordinary teenagers, from an ordinary school, do when they find out about MaidSafe… this thing is going to be bigger than any of us can even begin to comprehend! :slight_smile:

Thanks for everything that you are doing, and know that some of your biggest fans and supporters are not visible on the forums. They include a group of kids playing around with the thought of using your invention one day soon, sitting in a classroom on the other side of the world.

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That is…I certainly did not see that one coming when I started to read your post. Certainly a different perspective. Really nice to see a teacher that can enable his students to stuff like that, I really wish I had teachers like that in school. Even some of the IT teachers were not interested in new technologies, let alone the rest of them.

This is nice to see, keep it up man :slight_smile:

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Hi Chris, I’m Chris from Adelaide…this really is very heartening to read this.

You should get the students to put together a short doco on their activities…it would be a real pleasure to see their excitement.

I often wonder if there are others around me who will be hosting vaults…it would seem the project has more of a following in Oz than I appreciated…great stuff!

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Humbled, much, I think the team in Scotland will be only to happy to say hi over hangouts or skype whatever to the class on the day we launch Beta1

This is the energy drink we need as a team and now is great timing we just went thought a huge refactor very very fast so this is really nice news. We work hard and don’t really get time to reflect what we are doing sometimes or how important it is. So G’day Australia and from Scotland we promise to do you proud!

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Really inspiring post Chris. We have some tough days at times (way more good than bad though) and I think this is a post I will refer back to every now and then to remind myself why we’re so lucky to be involved in this project.

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Really appreciate your post Chris. This post is very inspiring and has raised our motivation level. Thanks a lot !!!

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Thanks for the post Chris, very encouraging. This has definitely lifted our spirits. I think it does remind us all how lucky we are to be part of this project. Thanks again :slight_smile:

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What an amazing thing to hear! Thanks Chris, I’m really choked and excited to hear this.

I hope we will see you and your students sometime, chatting with David & team in a hangout maybe. I’d love to hear from them what they imagine, what they are excited about, what they would like to happen.

Oh I have to share this!!! :slight_smile:

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Very inspiring post Chris, I wish I had been taught by a teacher as dedicated and forward-looking as you.
Do we have our first youth pod? :smiley:

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Awesome! I think we found a new SafePod!

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I think we should post out some Project SAFE t-shirts out, just to make it official.

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+1 on the youth pod !

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Great post! Replying just so that it gets a bump to the top again! :slight_smile:

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Hi Chris and students!

That’s both an inspiring and very impressive story ! Your support really helps a lot and reminds us of why we’re ultimately doing a project like this: to preserve the potential of the internet for those who come after us. And if we can make it even better at the same time, sure :smile:

Thanks a lot, keep in touch !

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Wow, that is great!

I must admit, your post made me aware there are so many people out there reading “everything” we write. Now I’m a little self-conscious. :blush:

But it’s fine. I do push a lot in order to help make Project SAFE a long lasting success. Cause I too want this technology.

Thanks for the inspiration.

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Thanks for all the positive responses everyone! :slight_smile:

Some of the students are very excited by what you have all said and actually think it would be a really good idea to start the first “Youth SafePod”. I have about 15-20 students who are ready to do something now, and plenty more would be interested once they see something has been started.

We have no idea what this would mean exactly, but we are keen to give it a go! lol

What do you propose would be our first steps?

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A new linked topic: “Creating the first Youth SafePod” :smile:

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Hi Chris,

We actually happened to have a MaidSafe Board meeting scheduled for last night, and during the “Any Other Business” section your original post was read out in its entirety. It went down very well there too by the way.

Anyway, there was a lot of enthusiasm to set up a Google Hangout with you all. I guess it would have to be a video call… given our accents and your accents, we’d mainly be communicating by hand-waving, nodding and smiling! :smile:

We could certainly bounce ideas about during that call, from just agreeing to keep in touch to setting up a SafePod for example. It would be great one way or another to have you all involved. If we get some invaluable teenage perspective and you get to be more involved in shaping the network or apps, I think everyone will feel the benefits.

In the meantime, thanks again for posting here and giving us all a boost.

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I’ll let the people at MaidSafe answer what it means from an official stand point, but I’d say just to keep doing what you are doing. From what I can read, you are probably one of the most, if not the most, active offline community around MaidSafe right now. So keep on learning, talking, brainstorming, exploring, dreaming, watching charts and spreading the word around. The big fun will start in Testnet 3 and beta so be ready.

It’s also an incredible technology to get them started in so many fascinating fields: hardware, software, networking, databases, finance, economy, ethics, politic, history, entrepreneurship and so many more.

Have fun!

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Hi @ctsafe,

As @anon86652309 suggests, we are keen to have a hangout with you guys, possibly coinciding with the launch of test net 3 and this could be the first meeting of the pod/meet up group. It would be great to get students feedback on what type of apps they would like to see as well as any ideas for apps that they have had. Do you think this is something that would be of interest?

I was wondering while reading your post what type of teacher you are, is it computing studies?

Depending on our development progress, and student skill set, we could then start to run through creating example applications at future meet ups.

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