Empowering our students to create NFTs and donating the proceeds to charity
Three Strive students are amongst the first-ever school students globally to code and mint their own NFTs 👩‍💻. What’s more - we’re partnering with Engineering Good to donate 80% of the proceeds to giving laptops to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and Strive has already committed $300 to the project 🚀
Head over to OpenSea to make a bid for the NFT to get your piece of history while empowering students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Kaavya, Armaan, and Aniayah explain how they coded their NFTs
But what is an NFT in the first place 🤔?
Imagine owning Elon Musk's first-ever computer program or the Beatles' first-ever song… These would be some invaluable pieces of history. However, without NFTs, which emerged very recently, being able to do this was impossible.
NFTs are digital tokens that prove ownership of digital assets. When an NFT is made, it is 'minted,' which means it is placed onto the blockchain and made available to purchase. They let you prove that you own something online- just like a property deed shows that you own a piece of land. With NFTs, you can stake a claim on history: whether as an iconic photograph, video, or a generative artwork like the ones our students coded.
To create these NFTs Kaavya, Armaan and Anaiyah needed to apply math concepts they learned at school. Many famous and very valuable NFT collections, such as the BoredApe Yacht club (Worth more than $1.4Bn), are created with the help of math concepts like permutations, combinations, and probability.
Unfortunately, many kids today find math boring and useless. The most common question you'll hear in a math class is; "When will we ever use this in the real world?". However, when students make an NFT, they start seeing a new math concept as another tool, or "paintbrush," for making their own exciting digital art pieces. There is a perception that math is all dry numbers and formulas, however as these students have illustrated math can be highly visual and creative.
“Strive has taught me a lot about math and science through coding. I found that coding normally, I was not able to apply the concepts I had learnt into other genres of study like math or sciences, but through Strive, I feel as though my coding knowledge has influenced my everyday life!”
Creating these NFTs not only helped to foster a passion for math in these three students but also exposed them to cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain, NFTs, and the whole crypto revolution. Topics that are not touched in most school curriculums.
“It’s fantastic to see my kid engaging with cutting edge topics that many adults even struggle to understand”
One of our investors had this to add when he heard about the project:
“Education systems need to evolve for a highly digitized world driven by AI / Blockchain and data at the heart of this … Strive Math is doing exactly that!”
We’re particularly excited about this project not only because it makes math more applicable to students’ lives while preparing them for the jobs of the future. But it also gives students an opportunity to use their creativity and their newfound coding skills to help those less fortunate by creating beautiful artworks that can be donated to charity. Coding literacy, including an understanding of web3, is becoming a fundamental skill to survive in the 21st century. However, most students do not have access to a high-quality technical education. That’s why we’re excited to be working with Engineering Good who’ll be using the funds to help provide laptops to students who struggle to afford them so they can also be a part of the technological revolution shaping our modern world. Patrick Hee the COO of Engineering Good told us:
“Through our work giving out laptops to students, we learned about the digital inclusion issue in Singapore—a disparity in access to tech devices and knowledge. This continues to be an issue despite the easing of COVID in Singapore, and the access to such devices and knowledge would be a great social leveler. We are very grateful to be selected by Strive Math as a beneficiary and look forward to working with like-minded partners such Strive Math towards a more digital inclusive society.”
These unique digital collectibles were produced with the help of Python, Javascript, and Strive's inspiring teachers. Our students coded these projects using JavaScript and a specific library called p5js, which is especially used for creating generative art. They were then converted to mp4s, published to Opensea, and minted on the Etherum blockchain.
We love celebrating the incredible projects our students create. Our primary goal is to connect the math that students learn in school to the real world. From this, we plan to support our students to create even more NFT drops in the future and keep using the proceeds to make a positive social impact.
