Leveraging Blockchain to Incentivize Education
Introducing EduCents: Education That Makes Cents
Here’s a little wake-up call: you’re doing tourism wrong. Don’t believe me? I can prove it.
If you were a traveller, you would know that it’s a pretty common occurrence to see small children at the outskirts of tourist attractions selling souvenirs. Sometimes the vendor kids get aggressive, even if they don’t speak your language. And they’re all so cute that you’re tempted to give in and buy something…but you don’t — maybe because you have no real need for those souvenirs, or maybe because your tour guide tells you not to.
A lot of people are guilty of this; I’ll admit I am too. Back in December, I took a trip to Cambodia where we visited lots and lots of temples and saw a ton of cute adorable children selling trinkets, mostly at Angkor Wat. I don’t know about you, but I always feel bad when I ignore them, but that’s what our guide told us to do. So we did, but it didn’t sit well with me at all (understatement of the year), since I recognize that I’m in a place of privilege and doing absolutely nothing to address bridging the inequality in opportunity that was smacking me in the face — really hard.
When I started really think about what was actually going on, it was then I realized: the Cambodian children were selling souvenirs instead of going to school. Their families valued short-term monetary incentives over long-term educations for their children.
The cycle of poverty is then perpetrated, and nobody is doing anything about it. The kids and parents are making money to support their families, and the tourists can buy souvenirs, so a lot of people don’t actually see this as an issue. But the truth is, they can’t escape the poverty because of their day ‘jobs’ as street vendors.
As tourists, we walk by without a second thought, but there’s actually a fundamental flaw in the way this world works.
The massive increase in tourism in Siem Reap has indirectly caused a decrease in school enrolment because there is more short term monetary gain in selling to tourists than attending school.
How do we break this cycle? The answer is education. You can see how the rates of education see an exponential decrease as the level of education increases. It’s pretty high for primary school because they don’t have the linguistic/intra-personal skillset for this, and once they mature and develop, they drop out.
Blockchain Technology: What You Need To Know
If you didn’t know, blockchain is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network where digital information (including tokens) can be distributed and stored. It can be thought of as a massive database where everybody can see all activity, and nobody can control anybody else. Probably the most important aspect is the fact that they have no central authority in the system, so there can’t be any corruption, and all logs are completely transparent, to be stored forever.
Demystifying the System: The Block and the Chain
Hold up… what is going on? Let’s unpack this.
How does this system actually work, who participates, and how do they participate?
Basically, there are 3 main participants: miners, nodes, and users — without them, the system would not work.
When users send transactions, they are accessed by the miners. Miners compete to solve complex math problems (decode hash functions) in order to create a block. These hash functions take forever to decode, so the miners end up doing a guess-and-check. The blocks contain a series of transactions which are put together by the miner as a reward for decoding the hash.
Why would the miners want to spend all their time decoding hash functions? Well, there’s actually an incentive to this — miners are rewarded in Ethereum (ETH) for creating the block (right now, it’s around 2 ETH, which is approximately $300) on top of the transaction fees that the users pay. They could also create empty blocks so they get the 2 ETH regardless, but it’s more economically rewarding to have a full block.
When the transactions are added to the block, the block is added to the chain — hence ‘block-chain’. The nodes receive the series of transactions, and the state of the digital ledger is updated. And voilà!
The Blockchain Advantage (or Disadvantage…)
- Decentralization: As we said earlier, this means there’s no central point of system failure. The network exists on every participant’s computer, and can’t be controlled by a single person or organization.
- Immutability: Prevents unauthorized and unwarranted changes to any accounts. You can’t edit past transactions, or change events, so all the information is credible and 100% true 24/7.
- Consensus: Prevents possible corruption due to the need for universal agreement between all nodes. You can check the state of the ledger at any given point in time.
- Transparency: This is one of those things that’s both a blessing and a curse. All transactions, records, and whatever information is stored on the blockchain is accessible to everyone on the network. It’s not necessarily an invasion of privacy, depending on how you take it.
A System That Parallels Student Needs
Learn more about our project on our website, linked here.
How does blockchain relate to kids’ lack of education in Cambodia?
TL;DR: We tokenized the Cambodian education system with cryptocurrencies to incentivize education.
Our (Crypto) Currency
CamboCoin : CCO
The value of what they receive (in the form of the CamboCoin (CCO) token) is of higher value than the money they make as vendors. This virtual currency could be used to purchase extra alimentation, healthcare benefits and financial aid in exchange with partnered organizations. The more the student attends school, the more CCOs would be awarded to the student. When exchanged, they are eliminated from circulation.
They get tokens for going to school, and we have also automated a system to track and record students’ participation in school — their attendance is taken via biometrics, clocking in and out at a certain time, but ensuring they stay for a minimum amount of time before claiming a reward.
KnowledgeCoin : KNO
While CCOs are awarded to students for attendance, KnowledgeCoins (KNC) are credential tokens, providing even more opportunities for economically disadvantaged youth to pursue barrier breaking education.
There are two main objectives in relation to education:
- Getting children in schools: Having an incentive will definitely encourage a higher rate of participation in schools, especially when the family is in need of the reward provided by the NGOs. This system also prevents corruption within governments.
- Ensuring the children stay in school: Since primary school has a 90% enrolment, we incentivized education with a multiplier (i.e. a primary school student doesn’t get as much as a middle school student, who doesn’t get as much as a high school student)
From least CCOs per day to most:
Primary School → Middle School → High School/Secondary School
The Role of the Smart Contracts
One of blockchain’s biggest advantages is its decentralization. Smart Contracts utilize this technology to effectively facilitate, verify, and enforce an agreement made between parties. Our system is comprised of two smart contracts, one for each token.
Our first contract manages CamboCoin. These tokens are minted and distributed to students who attend school. When these tokens are claimed by families, they are burned from our total supply in order to regulate their circulation.
Here’s an extract of the CCO smart contract code:
Another aspect that’s important is dealing with the actual transactions. This requires a transaction fee, which is paid in ETH. You can make a donation or a contribution to the accounts as well. Users can claim amounts of their tokens for reward.
The full code can be found here.
Here’s a little preview of the interface and how to review immutable information from their accounts. The existing data cannot be edited, and there is no reverse function for actions.
*Note: for the sake of the preview, this is a simplified interface and not actually what it looks like! But its purpose is just to give an idea of what we’re working with in addition to the website.
Reimagining The Future
Integration and technology is important, sure, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a purpose. Basically, you have to know your why. Innovating for the sake of innovating — who’s she?
Personal experiences and my travels definitely shaped my ‘why’. But even more than that, I want to do good in the world. The best way to do this is to frame this whole idea through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. So we focussed on quality education, economic growth, no poverty, and reduced inequalities.
Obviously it doesn’t stop there. Scalability is a huge part of our project, and we want to evaluate ways that we would expand it to more rural parts of Cambodia, and even further from there.
The end goal of our project is education — blockchain just happens to be a way that can facilitate this process. As a student, creating equal opportunity is really important to me, as it is to the rest of our team. Education has the power to dramatically change the path of a child’s life: from a street vendor to a tour guide. A huge focus of ours was breaking the cycle of poverty with this project, which has the potential to impact millions of lives.
This project was created in collaboration with Martin Thaw, Willis Guo, Mahitaj Rashid, Nicholas Chan, and Sean Huang.
Huge thanks to Blockscale Solutions, the Blockchain Learning Group, Adam, Erik, Mr. Zagabe, Mr. Tarle, and Mur for mentoring us throughout this process.
