Cardano Tech Training in Malawi

[IMPACT]

Until now, any teaching about Cardano that I've done here in Malawi has been privately to friends. Opening a public space where people can freely come to learn about Cardano will allow us to reach more people and improve their familiarity with crypto.

Training on how to securely use Cardano wallets and what kind of risks are involved in holding Ada and other cryptocurrencies, as well as the benefits of using smart contracts on a decentralized blockchain over centralized services, will help to replace people's skepticism with a practical understanding. Improving people's understanding will decrease the ability of scammers to leave bad impressions, as well as paving the way for future adoption in Malawi.

This project is focused on introducing people to the Cardano ecosystem and training those who want to gain a more technical understanding of how Cardano works. People who want to get more involved in the community will be encouraged to join town halls and community discussions so that they might find teams to work with if they like.

Increasing understanding about Cardano in Malawi will pave the way for other projects that might want to do things here later.

The main risk would be if people aren't interested in learning about Cardano. Making the space open to people who want to study other topics as well as advertising and giving away Ada to people who decide to learn about it will help to increase engagement. Another issue would be if the space becomes too popular, and we can't fit all the people. Making people sign up for time in the space can help mitigate that problem.

[FEASIBILITY]

$8000 would be for 4 months of Funding

Month one: Find office space, set it up with desks, and equipment. Open the doors for people to learn!

Months two through four: Teach about, discuss, and help people get started with Cardano and other technologies that might be beneficial for Malawi.

Whenever I'm not teaching, I'll be working on my other projects that are focused on collaboratively mapping out ideas without relying on proprietary or centralized tools; and a lower barrier-to-entry language that targets the Plutus Core language, the Web, and a highly scalable backend for off-chain code.

Renting office space: $1000/month

Utilities/supply cost: $600/month

Giving away Ada to give people experience with it: $400/month

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$2000/month

4 months

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$8000 total

In the beginning, there may be more supply costs and fewer people to give away Ada to, so the breakdown will vary from month to month.

The funding for this project won't go directly to compensating my wife and I for our time, so please consider supporting my other proposals:

Distributed Idea Mapping System (DIMS):

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401008

Poplar Programming Language:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401069

Ken Stanton

A mostly hobbyist programmer since the age of 12 (26 years) with a focus on distributed systems, compilers, and how programming language semantics influence developer experience. He loves to teach people about technical things.

Elsie Manase

A Malawian with a background in Logistics. She's going to focus on the administrative end of running the Cardano focused study space as well as helping her husband (Ken) manage his time between teaching and working on his projects. She's also interested in learning about Cardano and programming.

[AUDITABILITY]

The main indicator of progress would be whether or not more Malawians get involved with Catalyst and adopt Cardano for personal use.

A secondary indicator would be improvement in people's understanding of the technical aspects of Cardano after they get involved with the community.

If we provide a space were people are eager to come and learn or maybe even learn to teach others what they learn, that would be a success. Also, having more Malawians in Catalyst.

(I've never been funded by Catalyst since I started submitting proposals in Fund 2.)

Fund 2

Cardano and FP in Malawi:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/323778

This was my original, unfunded proposal in Catalyst, back while I was still living in California. My hope was to move here to Malawi and start a business teaching computer science and Cardano, but due to the fact that I've had to solely rely on my own savings, any teaching I've done here has been informal and just to my group of friends. Getting funded for the current Cardano Tech Training in Malawi proposal would help me teach in a more public setting.

Fund 3

Marlowe and Plutus Mobile:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/334477

This unfunded proposal was about creating a mobile interface that could allow people to easily build Marlowe ASTs on their mobile phones, with the hope of adding support for building up Plutus programs too, based on the information that was available at the time. This is related to my current Poplar Programming Language proposal. My hope was that Plutus would become something simpler than Haskell and stick more closely to what is available in the Core language without having a disconnect between Plutus Core's semantics and what language features exist in the off-chain code.

I wanted to work on this as a teaching tool here in Malawi.

Nmadi Space: A Digital Universe:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/334508

This unfunded proposal was a game idea that I'm still playing around with. I sort of want to get something working with my current Poplar Language proposal before I start building a Cardano-based game, because it should greatly reduce the complexity required to build all the necessary features, which would involve a side-chain attached to Cardano through the use of Hydra heads, while relying on a different set of CAP theorem tradeoffs for localized high availability of game states, unlike what is required for monetary security on Cardano. Poplar should allow me to write it all in one language, if I decide to write a game like this.

Fund 4

(No Proposals)

Fund 5

Mobile Plutus and Marlowe Dev Tools:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/352064

This unfunded proposal is an iteration of Marlowe and Plutus Mobile that I submitted in Fund 3. As such, it is related to Poplar in the current fund.

Fund 6

Distributed Collaboration Protocol (DCP):

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/369937

This unfunded proposal is directly related to the current DIMS proposal. It was focused on creating an open standard process for collaboration that focuses on scalability and limiting the amount of necessary knowledge for newcomers while helping to guide them to positions that fits their skills and desired role. DIMS is about building up a map of the idea space in the Cardano ecosystem that is easily traversable. If I add voice chat to DIMS, then finding an interesting conversation will be as easy as traversing the idea space through linked ideas. Other ways of connecting people may also be beneficial. These ideas were part of my research for DCP and may find their way into DIMS.

Plutus Integration with Pony Lang:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/370089

The current Poplar Programming Language proposal is what I really wanted to do when I submitted this unfunded proposal. 

Elm Integration with Plutus:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/370150

This unfunded proposal is also related to Poplar, since I want Poplar to contain the basic semantics of Elm as well as the functionality of Elm's Core library.

Fund 7

(No Proposals)

Fund 8

Distributed Idea Mapping System (DIMS):

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401008

An idea mapping system that will be highly useful for organizing and creating documentation for other projects like my programming language, Poplar, as well as opening new doors for decentralized collaboration.

This will be written using the same technology stack as Poplar so that I can hopefully port its code to poplar for easier codebase maintenance!

Poplar Programming Language:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401069

This is my programming language that I want to design and write compilation tools for to lower the barrier to entry for Dapp, side-chain, and blockchain-based game developers.

This project will highly benefit from DIMS, because it requires doing comparative analysis on the type theories of many different programming languages, while DIMS still doesn't exist I'm going using a proprietary application called Obsidian to build up my connected knowledge base. It's free for personal use. My hope is to make DIMS more minimal than Obsidian, so porting to DIMS might take some work if too many Obsidian features are used.

Cardano Tech Training in Malawi:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401102

I live in Malawi, the warm heart of Africa, with my wife Elsie (a Malawian), and this proposal is to start a public study space here where people can come to learn about technical aspects and usage of Cardano as well as functional programming among other technical topics.

I plan to teach, and use the space to work on my other projects when I'm not teaching. My wife will take care of administrative details as well as learning more about Cardano.

Having tools like DIMS will enhance collaborative learning sessions and help students to build up their own project ideas from the process of finding new connections in the collective idea space.

My hope for Poplar is to give new programmers the chance to utilize the full power of the Cardano blockchain in their own projects with minimum possible cognitive load. During my time here in Malawi, I've taught some of my friends here the basics of programming in Elm. Elm has simplicity, stability guarantees, and the visual output of a language for the web. These things make it more accessible for beginners. The cognitive load of setting up the tool chain, understanding Haskell compiler extensions, monadic composition, template Haskell, and more, makes it very difficult to even consider for a programmer who has just started learning. Abstracting away complexity, and providing easy-to-use tools, without compromising efficiency, and the guarantees given by a pure functional language with a powerful type system could make teaching Plutus-based development accessible... even to teach to beginners here in Malawi.