Instructors

Luke Kowalski Alexander Fred-Ojala Ken Singer Catherine
Luke Kowalski
(Lead Instructor)		 Alexander Fred-Ojala
(Technical Instructor)		 Ken Singer
(Entrep. Master)		 Catherine Wu
(Course Coordinator)
Industry Fellow, SCET SCET, Data Lab Managing Director, SCET SCET, undergrad

Lectures

Time: Mondays 3:00–7:00 pm

Location: Barrows 60

Office Hours

Last hour of class (Mondays 6-7PM)

Piazza

If the class wants to use a Piazza, we’ll set it up.

Course description

The Blockchain Challenge Lab course aims to bridge the gaps between industry and academia as well as hype and reality when it comes to Blockchain technology. This is an entrepreneurial and very applied course, where we will explain how the transformative Blockchain technology works, how to actually apply it to solve problems, and we will present a rational view of this often over-hyped technology.

The students will work in groups on a Blockchain related challenge over the semester, and in the end this project could be turned into a new venture or a contribution to research.

Students will learn proven entrepreneurial methods and apply user-centered design tools in creating their company. Guest lectures from industry and academia, as well as hands-on group exercises and presentation of use cases will help along the way. A competition among the groups will decide a winning team that gets to compete in the SCET Collider Cup at the end of the Fall semester 2018.

Syllabus

Date Topic & Talks Suggested Readings Homework
Lec1 08/27 Introduction: Welcome to Entrepreneurship & Blockchain basics

Guest lecture:
Where is the Opportunity in Blockchain?, by Ikhlaq Sidhu
  1. Prepare a 3-min presentation on a Blockchain company: Product, problem being served, target market, and other relevant info (Examples that contain: Name, Location, Management Team, Mission, Structure, Competitive Market Sector, Financials, Products and Services).
Lec2 09/03 No class! Labor Day

Class format and project

This is a lecture and project oriented class…

Enrollment

The class has a limited number of seats, if you’d like to enroll in the class you should add the following class in CalCentral: https://classes.berkeley.edu/content/2018-fall-indeng-185-002-sem-002

Reading

To get a good, comprehensive understanding of Blockchain technology we recommend that you read (or skim the following books):

FAQ

Can I audit the class? Reach out to Luke and Alex in an email and we will let you know.

Will lectures be recorded? Nope.

Short URL? Yes, you can use: http://bit.ly/ieor185

Additional Notes

For students who need computing resources for the class project, we recommend you to look into AWS educate program for students. You’ll get 100 dollar’s worth of sign up credit. Here’s the link.