Report name: devblockchain.tech #1
Reporting period: 21 Jan 2020 - 12 Feb 2020
Report Description: See below
Project Completion Percentage: 50-60%
Remaining Time to Completion: ~5 weeks + 2 Weeks of QA
Expected Results for the Next Period: Platform release
Materials Proving Progress on the Project: See below
Review of each KPI (Key Performance Indicator) or specific goal/milestone : See below ( Progression part and Roadmap)
Introduction
It’s now 25 days since our grant was approved by the ICON Foundation and that we started developing devblockchain.tech. In this report, we will present all the work done to date, what we plan to do next, and what the recent price increase of $ICX will bring to this project.
As a reminder, devblockchain.tech is a platform that aims to provide a 3-part learning experience on SCORE (Smart Contract on Reliable Environment):
Discover : It would be useless to learn how to develop Smart Contracts without knowing the fundamentals of Blockchain technologies, their possible applications and the philosophy of this ecosystem. This short part will aim at educating users about these principles.
Learn : This section is the main part of our platform. It will allow users to learn in an interactive way the development of SCORE in several chapters.
Build : To conclude, we will present all the professional opportunities available for ICON Ecosystem builders. We will present examples of teams and programs such as EEP or DPB.
We are aiming for a release on March 31st, we have 2–3 weeks dedicated to QA and background work on our Earn Campaign or SEO/SEA. So our efforts have been focused to design and build an MVP of the Learn section (the most important part of the project. )
Here are the tasks that have been started and their current progress:
Course Content & Learn section
devblockchain.tech won’t be a static platform. We want to add new courses on a regular basis after the initial release and thus be able to cover more in-depth topics. The tests and user feedback have taught us one thing: the “main” course, the one that 90% of the users will take and therefore the one they need most, is a course that will synthesize all the key concepts of SCORE development. This course will allow a developer with standard Python knowledge to easily transpose his knowledge and be able to start to build a project on ICON.
The first course entitled “ICON SCORE basics” will cover the following aspects:
- Structure & format of a SCORE
- Variables, store, and types
- Méthods & built-in properties
- Score deployment
- Interact with your SCORE from a web interface
This first course will allow the user to have all the keys in hand to start a project. The recent growth of ICON will allow us to finance the writing and integration of new guides in the future (Advanced SCORE dev., IRC tokens, etc.).
We have currently written 3/4 of the initial contents. About the “Learn interface” integration (browser-embedded IDE with a course/doc ), we have completed 75% of the work. Most of the workload lies in the user code verification logic. It is important to create a flexible system to avoid frustrating the user.
We planned to test our course with 3 different types of developers before the official launch (during the QA phase): Neophytes (our target audience), trained developers and SCORE development experts. Their feedback is essential to ensure that our course is effective and enjoyable to follow.
Here is a video of a demo of the Learn part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrQ1-QHNQ8w
Storytelling
We wanted to design a course that was pleasant to follow and engaging for the user. So we decided to create a storytelling that will guide the user through all the courses. We decided to create the “ICONBOT”, these little robots have the mission to contribute and interact with the ICON ecosystem and will be the common thread of the whole platforms.
The user will have the opportunity to customize his ICONBOT at the beginning of the course and to transcribe it into his contract data. We plan to take the concept one step further in future courses to create real interactions between contracts and ICONBOTs. We are confident that gaming mechanics are an important aspect of education and especially in code education. The biggest effort for the user is to get out of their comfort zone and this storytelling will help them on this aspect.
Sharpn Earn
Our platform also aims to bring new users through marketing and communication levers. That’s why we released the ‘Sharpn Earn’ campaign, this campaign is simple: the concept is to reward selected users who complete our first course with a $15 ICX reward.
We had planned to fund this operation out of our own pocket and to limit the number of selected developers to a maximum of 100 per quarter, but the recent growth of ICON (and thus of our grant) gives us the opportunity to drastically increase this number and thus bring more trained developers on a long term basis.
Pre-registrations have been open for several weeks and we were extremely surprised to see a great interest in this campaign. To date, we count more than 260 unique registrations. These figures allow us to set ourselves the following goals: “Complete the training of 750 ICONist 3 months after the release of the service”.
We will soon close the pre-registration phase, we will select the users with the least knowledge of SCORE development. The goal is to expand the ICON developer community and not to reward already trained devs 
.
Here is the “Sharpn Earn” link: https://devblockchain.tech/earn
Our roadmap
Here is the roadmap of devblockchain.tech until the launch on March 31st. We are currently well advanced to be able to reserve enough QA/user testing time to ensure a successful launch.
Thank you for reading, your feedback is very important to us! Feel free to leave a comment and tell us what you think about it.
loving your work.
It’s a pleasure to work on this project, we’re glad that the ICONist appreciate our work as well !