Proposal: official Rholang teaching program (Discussion)

[vkhansen]

Google doc: Rholang Certification Program

Similar to the meetup in a box idea I think there needs to more focus on teaching Rholang:

Proposal Rholang Ambassador A critical aspect of the Rchain project is teaching developers how to write programs in Rholang, while it may be possible to use wrappers to run other languages the greatest benefits in speed and scale come from writing programs directly in Rholang and preforming formal verification that code works as intended. Insufficient Rholang adoption/understanding is a major risk factor for the Rchain project as it has a steep learning curve and many people do not understand why it is necessary leading them to other projects (EOS, Ethereum) which offer more conventional development tools and languages.

The creation of a dedicated Rholang Amabassador/Teaching program is intended to specifically foster and promote Rholang. After an initial period of vetting instructors would work within their local regions to teach and recruit into the program.

A specific goal of this program will be to promote rholang adoption in parts of the world which have a sparse number of members, (i.e. Asia, India, Africa).

The majority of the classes are expected to be introductory to intermediate level but would be designed to grow into a comprehensive program over time.

Each Teacher commits:

Commit 20 Hours per week total at (600$/week)

Why: teaching, especially Rholang is demanding, significant travel time and event coordination is required, Teachers will probably spend more than 20 hours per week once travel and coordination is included esp. in remote areas of the world.

Specific milestones/breakdown:

Work with local schools and online sources to recruit students within your sphere of influence.

12.5 Hours per week:

Lesson Preparation Self-study Recruitment (University and Community College CS/CSE programs) Meetup (1-monthly) Marketing/outreach to hackerspaces & meetups Expanding/fixing tutorial materials Demo’s 1-on-1 and office hours

(3) Classes / week (online or/in person) (2.5 Hours each x 7.5 hrs. total)

(ideally have the majority of meetings in person, although not possible in some parts of the world)

Obtain room at local school or co-working space.

(Reasonable venue/room/snacks/water costs reimbursed by Rchain as with meetups)

Verification:

Confirmation of effort and quality of the teachers could be obtained through student feedback and self-reported metrics from each class additionally collecting information on each student that they are credibly software developers or working to become developers. Instructors would be vetted and supervised by the senior level members in their region to ensure quality is maintained. (Video’s/Pictures/Survey)

Legal

Task Submitter shall not submit Tasks that will involve RHOC being transacted in any manner that (i) jeopardizes RHOC’s status as a software access token or other relevant and applicable description of the RHOC as an “asset”—not a security— or (2) violates, in any manner, applicable U.S. Securities laws.

[nonnykul]

@vkhansen.Nice proposal you have here, trying to place more emphasis on Rholang, like meetups are been done.

Anyone that knows Rholang is in high demand and incentive should be rewarded for teaching rather than working on their own project.

[David405]

@vkhansen I have been doing something similar in Africa ( Nigeria to be precise), we have held two successful meetups #852, #796, we have engaged quite a number of universities #681, also we have regular work study of which some of the participants are now active in the Cooperative Laboratory (Colab) https://discord.gg/R8VHeVm.

I believe this is important and should be added to the RAM meeting agenda tomorrow and also presented as part of the bounty progress for Greg's debrief. Like I have always said, any programming language is only strong as its developers community and if rholang and/or RChain must be widely used, its developers community must be ubiquitous in some way, (let's take a clue from Google developers), Google has a strong developers community with a lot of free training and resource materials and this has made their products widely used around the globe.

At colab, we intend to start an RChain academy (an online school for RChain) in Sept and I believe we can never enough rholang, rnode, comp calculi coaches, schools or tutorials, the goal should be to make RChain ubiquitous and have a thriving developers community.

[Tonyprisca13]

@vkhansen nice proposal. Will you be available to discuss it in the meeting?

[dckc]

I'm interested to know how this relates to the RChain Solutions Group mentioned in, for example, the Aug 22 community debrief.

I chatted briefly with @David405 , who pointed out that Ned Robinson, director of the solutions group, was at the Aug 22 RAM meeting (IOU a pointer). He offered to follow up with Ned to talk about the relationship and possible collaboration or merging.

[Viraculous]

@David405 I second the idea of an RChain academy, its a broad concept with many arms. I am looking at something similar to blockgeek but in more incentivized way. As a cooperative also, believe that an academy could mean much more than just a community of developers.