Students that demonstrate outstanding technical skills during the course on coding smart contracts, will be able to gain special badges that Ethereum Labs and ConsenSys view as strong additions to internship submissions.

Exosphe.re, a community of experts involved in Startups, with the support of ConsenSys and Ethereum Labs is opening an Ethereum Stream at the Exosphere Academy 2016 in Chile. Exosphe.re’s Ethereum Curator, Moritz Bierling announces that attendees at the Academy in 2016 will be guided in their learning by Philip Saunders, CEO and Founder of PAX, a civic network built on Ethereum.

A course on coding smart contracts

According to Bierling, the focus of the course shall be on learning to code smart contracts in Solidity while building and contributing to real apps and businesses, both on Exosphere partnered projects and private projects.

Participants at the course will be able to earn one or more ConsenSys badges certifying their contribution to projects. Same goes for Ethereum Labs, where participants will be able to build the human-facing side of dapps under EL’s umbrella. Students at the event are required to posses pre-existing knowledge in coding (preferably Javascript), but that can be learned in the time until the program starts.

Bierling says:

“Being able to work on real things is important for gaining real world skills and allows the student to produce value for potential employers and business partners.”

Successful students might get employed by Ethereum Labs and ConsenSys

Students that demonstrate outstanding technical skill and share a philosophy of human-centric design will be strongly considered for continuing work relationships with Ethereum Labs. Similarly, ConsenSys views the achievement of the special badges as well as Academy participation in general as a strong addition to internship submissions.

As announced earlier this year, students of this and any other program are eligible to submit payment via Ether.

This program fills a need in the market for blockchain education, where corporate training and consulting services focusing on established financial institutions remain the most popular offerings.

Speaking to Cointelegraph about this project, the Founder at Vanbex Group, Lisa Cheng says:

“Exosphere encourages thinking of the Creative Economy, this project will cultivate new ideas for developing on Ethereum and folks like Philip Saunders of Pax will open up new minds towards the Ethereum platform.”

Ethereum is a logical choice

Michael Vogel of Netcoins sees this as a commendable move by Exposhere. He says that there has definitely been a massive shift from 18 months ago when large companies completely dismissed blockchain technology as irrelevant. Now, most banking institutions and large organizations are actively embracing it. Part of this is due to companies like IBM making blockchain technology a core offering.

Vogel concludes: