SLC | S21W5: Mini Research for Students

Greetings, dear friends it's the fourth week of the Steemit Learning Challenge for season 21, and I'm delighted to be part of this contest organized here by the brilliant teachers. This week we are looking at Mini Research for Students. It is a beautiful topic that I will also want to share my thoughts on.

1. Determine the topic of the mini-research for your students and why the research needs to be done by the students. 1 point

Considering my location course of studies and my dedication to this amazing platform, I have decided to share a topic based on the Steemit blockchain. It is important to note that the school where I lecture is currently on vacation; hence, I'm shifting this research down to the people I'm guiding through the Steemit platform, as they are all considered my students as well.

So the topic I have selected for the students as a mini research is Understanding the Steemit Blockchain and how to leverage your earnings. Now, you may want to ask why I have selected this topic among others; the reason is not far-fetched.

The scope of the topic is narrowed down to Steemit blockchain technology, the research though it can be covered within the shortest possible time as it mainly involves performing the basic achievement tasks 1-6 and also getting acquainted with the happenings around the platform by following the Steemit blog for latest and further information.

Also, it is a period where cryptocurrency is taking the lead in the happening around the world; hence Steemit offers one the opportunity to learn and earn via the Steemit learning challenge.

The students must carry out this research under my guidance because I will not forever remain there to guide them, and as I guide them today, they are also expected to guide others tomorrow, and that is how the chain continues.

If they don't carry out the research themselves, they may not be familiar with the platform, let alone guiding others. So, the research aims to strengthen them with all the needed knowledge they need about the Steemit platform.

2. Formulate a problem or two, then develop some relevant interview questions to answer the problem? 1 point

Based on the Steemit platform, as a newcomer, the two major things that must be done first are introducing yourself and also learning about the security of your account. So, based on these first two achievement tasks, I consider them as the problems that must be tackled firstly by all new Steemians.

So, in this section, I will list the problems followed by relevant questions that students need to do their research and findings on and possibly provide an answer to.

Problem Number 1: How to begin (Introduce yourself)

In this section, the basic questions that the student must encounter include the following.

• Setting your account (creation, profile picture, linking to other social media, etc)

• A brief history about yourself (family & education inclusive)

• Your hobbies (likes and dislikes)

• How you got to know about the Steemit platform

• Any knowledge about cryptocurrency before (share with us)

Problem Number 2: Account Security

• Understanding all my Steemit keys

• Why should I keep my Steemit keys secured?

• Best ways to store my Steemit key (online or offline)

• What I must do if my Steemit account gets compromised

3. Assign your students to conduct research using the prepared interview questions and observe every activity the students do, sharing photos and videos during the activity? 3 points Photo 1 point and Video 3± minutes 2 points

Seeing that the research is an elaborate one though it is possible to finish within a week or two, the first thing I have asked my students to do is to write the achievement 1 post after guiding them through the process of account creation.

The stated problem serves as a guide to them to know which to do first before the other. So, coming to Steemit requires them to understand how to properly create an account and the needed requirements for that. After that, I gave them a sample of an introduction post, which they should read through and then use the sample to write their own.

Now, during this period, I had to go around and check to be sure that they were creating the account properly using a unique username, email, and phone number and also getting their required codes from email and phone number, respectively.

Also, I checked to be sure that they were also writing the introduction based on the guide and sample provided for them and not just copying from the sample I sent. So, my observation and guidance helped them to work better and produce the desired result.

I'm still in the process of guiding them, as you can see from the image, and for that reason, I won't be attaching any links to their achievements post yet, but hopefully, when they are done and are ready to make their post then, I will share a diary containing their links.

4. Explain and elaborate on any interesting findings that occurred during the research and what are the conclusions of the research results? 3 points

During the research, I discovered a lot of things, and most of the things I noticed were during account creation. Having directed them to how they can effectively create an account on the Steemit platform, I noticed that some numbers are not accepted during the Steemit registration.

It is important to mention here that in Nigeria, our numbers start with +234, which is the official code for Nigerian numbers. Aside from that, every number begins with either 081, 080, 070, 071, or 090, 091.

Now my observation is that those with numbers starting with 090, and 091 don't accept registration as it always shows invalid. This means that we had to use numbers starting with either 081, 080, or 070, 071 when doing registration for the new Steemians.

Other findings that occurred during the research are that I was also able to see that some of the user find it difficult to write their own introduction well because they were copying and pasting from the link I shared with them as I took about time to read through some of the post they have written.

Based on the findings I made, I'm concluding that the research topic given to the people I'm training or my students in the platform have started their journey already and some of them may continue for a longer time but others may drop along the way seeing that they find it difficult to even write a little introduction post.

This means that from the number of persons you see in this class today only but a few will remain consistent and steadfast in this journey and those who are not able to continue may drop along the way. Also, they have learned that registration are done via only some specific numbers with unique usernames which has not been taken before.

5. According to your observations, what are the weaknesses of the students during this research, and what are your steps in developing their analytical skills in the future? 2 points

As said earlier above, one of the weaknesses I found out with some of the students was that some of them went ahead to copy the sample of the introduction post I sent to them after guiding them and telling them what was expected of them.

It implies that some of them don't know how to properly read and understand and then put in their own words some of what they have read. Also, I noticed that most of them don't use Grammarly when writing which made their work have a lot of grammatical errors and wrong spellings.

So after seeing these two issues during the research by the students, I decided to take more time to explain to them how they can effectively write using their own words. I made it clear to them that since all of them can read and write it means everyone has something to offer so they should try to offer that which they have as that is what the platform needs.

Secondly, seeing the errors some of them were making while writing I decided to introduce the Grammerly tool to them and also had them signed up and also guided them on how it is been used. This and many more are some of the steps or strategy I device to tackle the issues I found out during the research made by the students.

I want to finally invite a few friends of mine, @josepha, @suboohi, and @dove11, to also share their participation in this contest if they haven't done that yet.

Cc
@miftahulrizky
@fantvwiki