Web3 Educational Project in Italy

Context

The vision for a resilient digital ecosystem in our society needs continuous training and experimentation. Education in schools is the backbone where that vision needs to thrive. In a High-School in Lecce, Italy, there is a community of students called, Banzhack, with a bottom-up governance model . They are a movement for innovation, coordinators facilitate and listen to the evolution and needs of the community. One of their current stream is about ‘New economy’. In this exciting and impactful project, I was hired to design and deliver sessions about blockchain and web3 for their community of students. This activity is also supported by the EU 2030 Digital Compass strategy.

Approach

The five session on-line, on a weekly basis three hours long, took place between November and December 2022 with the title: ‘ New pathways with blockchain and web3’. 25 High-school students embraced a learning journey that I designed to raise their awareness, to inspire their entrepreneurial attitude and direction and fully participate as creators and critical thinkers in Web3. This is the breakdown of the five sessions:

1 – Web3: what’s it, impact e relationship with Blockchain
2 – Decentralization in work, money and personal data
3 – Networks & communities’: logic and implications
4 – Tokens & DAOs: case studies and group discussions
5 – Team presentations, p2p feedback & stewardship

With dynamic conversation and rituals in each session, examples such as Metamask, Brave, and questions for reflection, I used slido to visualise and trigger critical thinking. The intention was to enact their ability to participate in Web3 practicing of global competencies such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and positive attitude, character competencies such as empathy and integrity, honesty.
Also, they had opportunity to understand the power and collective responsibility of the current shift in our society and economy with a progressive decentralization. I creared survey before and after the session to make informed design decision and report finding.

Outcome

Students embraced a journey, to design with awareness, how to shape and share their own entrepreneurial attitude and direction, to fully participate as creators and critical thinkers in Web3. In the last session, four teams of six students each, presented their knowledge and shared their own report on their website.

After the sessions, with the Banzhack community and the coordination team, we had a debrief with an exciting horizon. We are designing a pilot project with two schools from two regions, Puglia and Toscana, to experiment mechanisms of incentives and consensus to understand further the students needs and impact.

Read here the local press release in Italian.