Overview

The Moonbuilders Academy is the perfect learning environment for developers who want to create multi-chain applications on Moonbeam and Moonriver. The academy offers a comprehensive and asynchronous learning suite of developer-focused courses, providing access to a vast portfolio of high-quality content that includes an overview of Polkadot, Moonbeam, ecosystem tools, and interoperability features.


Course curricula in the Moonbuilders Academy are designed to provide developers with the knowledge and skills they need to build and test dApps on Moonbeam. We believe in flexible learning, and that's why our academy is self-paced and asynchronous. However, we also understand that sometimes students need a helping hand, so help is always available on our Moonbeam Discord channel. 


Prerequisites

Moonbuilder’s Academy assumes that developers have some familiarity with programming. If they do not, there are plenty of courses to help them kickstart their developer journey (and we welcome them to Moonbuilder’s Academy once they have!). There are no specific language requirements, but students may find it helpful to be familiar with languages like Javascript, Python, or Solidity. 


Niche

There are lots of highly-rated Ethereum and solidity developer courses like Patrick Collins’ 30 Hour Web 3 Developer Course or Gregory McCubbin’s dApp University. Content in the Moonbuilders Academy is not intended to replace these courses, and we recommend them to all students. Rather, the academy fulfills a niche where there are fewer educational resources available to devs at the intersection of Polkadot, Moonbeam, and its ecosystem integrations. Additionally, Moonbuilders Academy is meant to be forward looking and cover groundbreaking topics like Connected Contracts, advanced indexing protocols, and XCM. 


Creators making content for Moonbuilder’s Academy are encouraged to be as specific and thorough as they’d like. Don’t be afraid to venture “into the weeds” in order to explain a complicated topic. That’s what the devs are here for :) 


The Path of a New Moonbeam Dev

Moonbeam aims to support developers at all levels and to that end, has no less than 4 tailored programs to empower developers, including:

  1. Moonbuilder’s Academy
  2. Hackathons Program
  3. Grants Program
  4. Moonbeam Foundation & Arrington Capital Ecosystem Fund


Moonbuilder’s Academy is perhaps the first step of the funnel and that’s a large responsibility to bear! If we fail to engage newbie devs and get them excited about building on Moonbeam, they may not make it to launching a project on Moonbeam. 


These levels are not meant to be an exact science but they are quite different from one another. That is to say, a dev who’s just starting out at Moonbuilder’s Academy is unlikely to be ready for the Arrington Capital Ecosystem Fund as a next step. 


Success / KPIs

The goal of Moonbuilder’s Academy is to prepare students to take the next step in their developer journey - to hack on (and possibly win) a hackathon project. Gauging exact conversion metrics here is difficult, but we can follow up with hackathon participants and analyze the completion rates of Moonbuilder’s Academy. As is typical with many educational courses, lots of students start the course and a small percentage make it all the way through. 


Course Content / Structure

Perhaps the best way to familiarize yourself with Moonbuilder’s Academy is to check out a couple of lessons. 


The general structure of each lesson looks like the following: 

  • Video Content - This is the primary way to deliver your course content, and most lessons contain a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 4 videos.
  • Resource Links - Each video should be followed by relevant resource links to github repositories and documentation. At a minimum, you should include all links referenced in the video - this is critical to make it easy for devs to follow along with your on-screen content. Ideally you can link to additional resources for devs to further their learning.
  • Quiz - Each lesson culminates with a short multiple choice quiz of 10 questions or less. You can optionally include project-based work or longer form assignments that do not fit into a quiz structure.
  • Where to Get Help - There is a comments section that is open for devs to ask questions but this is difficult to manage and easy to miss, so we highly encourage you to point your students to a Discord or other location that is frequently monitored, in order for your students to get the best support experience. 


Moonbeam has 4 live courses at this time:

  1. Introduction to Polkadot and Moonbeam
  2. Building Cross Chain Connected Applications (a.k.a. Moonbuilder’s Advanced Course)
  3. Streamline Cross Chain and EVM Processing with Subsquid
  4. Efficient Blockchain Indexing with SubQuery Framework


Re-use of Content

When creating content for Moonbuilder’s Academy we don’t want you to have to recreate the wheel. It’s absolutely fine (and encouraged) to re-package existing documentation and tutorials and present them in a new video format for Moonbuilder’s Academy. 


Re-using short individual videos is also fine. For example, if you have a tutorial on staking on your YouTube channel, you don’t need to make a new video tutorial on staking just for Moonbuilder’s Academy. However, taking existing hour-long workshop videos already posted to YouTube and slicing them up would be considered unsuitable for Moonbuilder’s Academy.   


Best Practices

  • Content longevity - Make content as long-lasting as possible. You don’t want your video content to have to be constantly updated to remain “fresh”. Wherever possible, try to make your content long-lasting so that the course can remain live and accurate for as long as possible.  
  • Keep individual videos to 10 mins or less - Lessons can contain multiple videos, but try to slice up your content such that it fits into 10 minute videos or less. Short attention spans are the norm here so make your content as digestible as possible. 
  • Document your links and resources - You don’t want your devs to have to manually type in any links that you show in your video so make sure that you provide these resources as links below your video.
  • Additional resources - for students who want to read more about a particular topic or need just a bit more info to cement the topic, try to provide helpful links, such as documentation links, stack overflow questions, forum posts, etc. Most people won’t click these links but those who do will find them helpful. 


Disclaimer

All content produced for Moonbuilder’s Academy has the following disclaimer appended to the bottom of the page: Disclaimer: Moonbuilder's Academy Content is for informational purposes only and Moonbeam is not endorsing the project or warranting the accuracy of all the info. Always DYOR. See disclaimers contained at: https://moonbeam.foundation/media-disclaimer


Get Started: Create an Ecosystem course in the Moonbuilders Academy

Getting started is easy - simply connect with Kevin from our developer relations team at [email protected] and/or feel free to set up a call to discuss your participation in the academy.


Once you're ready to start creating your top-notch content for the academy, please fill out this form that will give us the initial information we need for the course homepage. Our team will be in touch soon to guide you through the next steps.