Launching the best Blockchain course – Africa Data School
When Africa Data School started in 2019, the vision was to be the best online platform for learning future technologies. The school started with a data science course and in July 5th they started with a blockchain course.
Here are some statistics on the success of the data science course.
Number of students taught (Total – 220+ students )
- 2019 – 19 Students
- 2020 – 58 students
- 2021 – 184 students (as at July 2021)
Students have come from over 18 African countries. This shows how curious people are on new technology that seems hard to grasp. People have come from South Africa , Lesotho, Ghana, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Uganda , Kenya , Sudan, Gambia , Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Malawi and Mauritius just to name a few.
The course runs for 12 weeks. The classes are held every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 5.30pm to 7.30 pm East African time. The fee for the data science and machine learning course is 350 USD.
Why start a blockchain course?
It is in line with the vision of the ADS platform. Blockchain is a new technology that will heavily impact our future of transactions. Here are some of the industries that have already got use cases;
- Finance – Bitcoin
- Advertising – Basic Attention Token
- Social Media – Minds Token
What is being taught during the blockchain course?
During the first week of the blockchain course , you will learn about the basics of blockchain and the basics of decentralised ledger technology.
The second week is where we learn about blockchain and how it applies to the following industries.
- Supply chain
- Banking and Finance
- Music
- Healthcare
This is where we learn that in blockchain , we do not trust, we verify.
The third week is where we get into ethereum and the web 3.0. We will learn the terminologies like Ether, gas fees etc. as wallets and how they work. You will even learn how to setup your own ethereum Wallet.
The fourth week gets a little technical with cryptography which is the amazing technology powering the security attribute of the blockchain. We will also take a deep dive into smart contracts. A smart contract is a piece code running on blockchain. You will deploy your first contract on the ethereum blockchain if you have never done it before.
In the fifth week we get into the nitty gritties of consensus mechanisms. How do we know that transactions data in the blockchain is reliable? We will learn about proof of work, proof of stake and proof of space. We will also look at NFT’s or Non fungible tokens.
In the sixth week we will learn about cryptocurrency exchanges. How you can buy bitcoin and ethereum. We will also get into introduction to decentralised applications.
How will the course be conducted?
The course is fully online ,meaning you can access the classes from anywhere in the world.
In each lesson, there will be 1 hour of theory and 1 hour to play around with the blockchain and blockchain related technologies.
We will have guest lectures from people building crypto companies.
How much is the fee for the course?
35000 Kes(350 USD)
Course Duration
6 weeks
Conclusion
Our hope and aim is to make sure that our students can be able to build blockchain and cryptocurrency. We have realised that our universities take too long to catch up with new technology that is relevant in the current world. We become consumers of new technologies instead of becoming builders. In the coming years, Africa will be producing products in blockchain and Artificial intelligence for the rest of the world to consume.
