Last month I attended an interesting Orlando Bitcoin Meetup. The Meetup took place at Bright Learning Academy, a school for special needs students that works with children who need an alternative to traditional school settings. The school takes a technological approach to learning.
It’s no mystery that kids learn to understand technology much more easily than we do. That’s just the way things go. Bright Learning Academy is teaching money management and free market principles with Bitcoin technology. They did it before MIT.
Last winter, school teacher Robert Lefebure began signing up students for a wallet at Blockchain.info.
“The idea, explains Robert, “was to use Bitcoin to teach personal money management and economics because, frankly, it’s hard to understand where Bitcoin is taking us if you don’t know what economic factors took us to where we are today. I gave each of them what was (at the time) $3 worth of BTC. The reaction of the kids varied from “I want to spend it right away” to “what is it? A couple of months later MIT announced giving $100 worth to each of their students but we had already “been there, done that!”
Robert started to get some of the kids to post articles on the school blog site and add their wallet addresses to their articles. A few raised a little money that way too.
Bright Learning Academy plans on providing their students with bitcoins this upcoming school year. But next time around, more places accept bitcoin than before. The kids should have more leeway.
The founder of Bright Learning Academy is Alan Mark Friedland. He has been in the financial, investment and securities businesses since 1984. Mr Friedland worked for Stuart James Company, Blackstock and Company and Prudential Bache Securities as a registered representative. Mr. Friedland founded Edge Securities member N.A.S.D. in 1986 which became one of the first leveraged day trading firms for professional traders. Edge Securities was an option trading member of the American Stock Exchange. Mr. Friedland is an expert in short term securities trading. He has developed many successful custom computer programs to trade the markets over the past 25 years. He visualized and created one of the first social media chat rooms and advertising websites on the Internet in 1994 at www.talkroom.com and questchat.com. In 2000, he developed one of the first web based intranet learning products for public school systems. In 1999 he created one of the first laptop based Cyber School in Orange and Seminole Counties Florida. Mr. Friedland has been developing Forex automated currency trading programs for the past 4 years. He is developing Bitcoin technology to share these programs.
“My interest in Bitcoin began in 2012 – in particular, its ability to create trading markets,” says Alan. “It is probably the biggest opportunity since the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s. We have created our own school cryptocoin to reward students and as a way to reach out to the business community to help with donations.”
Bright Learning Academy has began pioneering money management education by utilizing the still nascent bitcoin currency. MIT followed suit. It would be no surprise if more and more educational institutions begin to utilize the educational potential of bitcoin.
Visit the school website Here
