One of the more illustrious tertiary education institutions in the United States now has an interesting course with an interesting final project. The course is called Startup Engineering and according to the lecturers, the motivation behind it is because it‘s: “œThe class we wish we’d had before starting up our co/lab.“ The final project to the course entails building a Bitcoin-powered crowd funding site.
The syllabus consists of 50% technology whereas the rest is mainly philosophy. It includes some multiple choice philosophy exams as well as programming assignments. Stanford is as the epicentre of Silicon Valley, and the university says that academia teaches you how to solve a problem, but not which problems are valuable to solve. This is what the course is meant to do.
The final project requires the students to setup a Bitcoin merchant account and feature their own product through Selfstarter, an open-source Kickstarter clone. Bitcoin is an open-source digital currency, and its uses seem endless. Its value can be very volatile though (check out our in-depth analysis here, where we look at its value as a currency and its use as a commodity). Some South African companies have also taken to the platform to receive payments.
Source: Stanford
