Along with many artists from around the world last week, I finished my first exerted effort to participate in Genuary. I have gotten to know many of these artists over the past year since joining the fxhash community. My Semaphore project represents my most complex submission to the marketplace thus far.

Where you decide to place it in the spectrum of projects available to mint out there doesn’t matter. The thing that does matter to me is what a good friend who teaches art and is an artist herself said to me this week: “you’re an artist now.” It caught me off guard.

For nineteen years, I have been a high school teacher of lots of things - mathematics, physics, web programming, senior research project, automation, and app development. I’ve taught in public schools in New York City, an international school in Hangzhou China, and most recently at an international school in Vietnam. Near the end of the last school year there, I announced to my students that after six years, I would take the subsequent year off for a sabbatical, along with my wife (also a teacher) and my then six year old daughter. The plan was to travel and see friends and family that we hadn’t seen for a while due to COVID. One student asked “so what are you going to do with your time?” I laughed and answered honestly that I didn’t know.

One thing I did know was that generative art would be a big part of it.

My way of understanding a new field has always been to create or do projects in the field myself. As a teacher (particularly in coding and development), my secret recipe has been to pitch new courses on what I want to learn, and subsequently teach students to do projects of their own in those courses. Showing students how to learn, try, fail, and iterate upwards to solve problems alongside them is a genuine way to show what learning looks like outside the typical school experience.

The ideas of blockchains and NFTs were new to me, but given my technical background and experience, my friends, family, colleagues, and students were asking me what I thought about them. I knew I needed to know more. Generative art was also on my radar. I was curious about how people were using algorithms to generate designs and wanted to see if I could do it myself. Teaching is a demanding job though, with many things always competing for time.

The time would come. In late summer 2021, things changed. Ho Chi Minh City entered a full no-leaving-your-home lockdown, and we started the school year virtually. The maker-space at school was inaccessible. I couldn’t get any electronic parts to tinker and build at home. I could run (with a mask of course) in the courtyard of our apartment building, but that was it for exercise.

With my options limited, I had all the motivation and the time to get started with generative art. I started challenging myself to make something (anything) in the hour between when my daughter started virtual school and the start of an all school meeting mid-week. I used the best results as virtual backgrounds for Zoom and for my online classes. I had never gotten much out of sketching or doodling, but seeing code generate beautiful patterns and designs helped me feel better, particularly given the situation we were experiencing in Vietnam.

I didn’t realize at the time that late 2021 would be a golden era for the medium, particularly in the world of Tezos and fxhash. Artists were releasing projects on this new platform designed deliberately for the needs of its community. I had never seen anything like it, but started to see how it brought together different ideas of blockchain that previously were confusing. It didn’t explain everything, but at least it was a start.

I also saw what generative art did for my well being. I knew it would do good for students to experience it for themselves. There was no time to build a new course, but I added a unit on generative art to an automation course that I was teaching students in grades 10 - 12. It was a perfect opportunity to apply concepts of modular code, state machines, and collaborative tools in a virtual school context with outputs that everyone could get into. I built videos, assignments, and projects for students to complete that they could explore and submit for an end of semester project.

In the back of my mind, I knew all along that this was just the first step toward getting students onto fxhash. Then we could learn about blockchains and NFTs together. At that time, I hadn’t minted anything of my own. I couldn’t get any Tezos myself until I traveled home for the December break, the first time since fall of 2019. Once I did, I started working to get one of my projects on fxhash, and got some of my first mints. It was exhilarating to see that other people were interested in what I was creating. I quickly became impressed with the fxhash community and how uniquely supportive members were to each other.

At the start of the next semester when I saw my students again, I was ready to help them take their generative projects from the preceding semester and put them onto the blockchain by getting them onto fxhash. The surprising part was…none of them were up for it. I didn't get a single student to even sign up for a wallet.

There were lots of reasons at the time. Some were exhausted after a full semester of online school, even after a full holiday break. For others, getting out the code they wrote just a month before reopened all of the emotions they felt during that challenging time. Others were as confused as I was before I minted my first project, saying things like “why do I need a wallet?” Or “who is going to be looking at my work?”. Others were too kind to say it, but they had done what they had done for the purpose of a school assignment, and did not see the need to revisit it in the new semester. I decided to let it go. We had a fresh start in January 2022, a retry to the school year with hybrid and in-person learning. When I found time outside of teaching and managing the busy second semester, I continued to build projects and post them myself on fxhash when I found the time during the rest of the school year.

Once I started my time actually enjoying the sabbatical, having time to do nothing but tinker with ideas for generative art projects has been incredibly rewarding. I’m inspired by the efforts of artists to publish projects and learn from them by exploring their code. I’ve published new projects and continued to learn new skills in coding, project organization, and techniques for generating patterns. Genuary was a productive month where I saw the incredible creativity of the community thinking about the same prompts that I was. Over the past few days, I've been thinking that now is a good time to start thinking about these ideas again.

With this experience and perspective, I am confident in what I came to believe a year ago: the combination of generative art, the fxhash marketplace, and the fxhash community offer a powerful context in which students can do meaningful learning.

There are many resources out there to help students get started learning with generative art. I guarantee that if you ask your students to find what they need to learn about it, they will get there faster than you do. The best part is that teachers don’t need to be the experts. Though it is always helpful to experience it in advance to know what questions students will ask, students don't need you to be the expert. Instead, teachers need to do what they always do: provide support to students working through the challenge of developing new skills, build a supportive community of learners in the classroom, and be mentors of the learning process. Generative art brings together concepts of mathematics, computational thinking, art and design. There are many correct answers. There are many examples from simple to complex of how algorithmic thinking can generate patterns we see every day, as well as ones we could never have imagined before we see them.

And while a teacher could simply add a unit about generative art to a course, it is a missed opportunity to engage with the concepts of blockchain and cryptocurrency that are popping up more frequently every day. It is easier than ever to get started with blockchain tools. I chose the Tezos blockchain because it was a more energy efficient option than the alternatives in the generative art world when I started learning about it. There are software wallets that would let students sign up using an email address. The challenge of getting students Tezos might be as simple as wallet or DAO that funds students or teachers that want to get involved. The brilliance of using the hash from the blockchain as a random seed is a great way for students to understand the uniqueness of running a generative art program to get a specific output every time. It is how I have explained the difference between minting an NFT and choosing ‘save as’ - a refrain we all have battled as we explain what NFTs do.

You could argue that the fxhash marketplace isn’t a necessary part of this. A teacher could have an online gallery of student generative art that doesn’t involve blockchain at all, and that is a plausible option. I say that there is a big downside: this ensures that the audience stays in the classroom or school. Many students view schools as self-contained learning environments that are nothing like the real world. What is more real world than students submitting a project to a marketplace visible by anyone, particularly if collectors and other artists could show their appreciation by minting? It builds student understanding of building value through contributing projects. Students often see cryptocurrency as nothing more than staking coins and hoping that the market goes up. By actually creating art that others want to see, and getting their own transactions of currency as a result of the fxhash marketplace, students will better understand the concept (and joy) of creating value for others.

The fxhash community is the final essential piece to this. As I said before, teachers are experts at building community in their classrooms. Students sometimes need to be convinced that the things teachers say are true outside of their classrooms. The fxhash community has been consistently supportive to newcomers that want to get into generative art for a range of reasons. I’ve gotten feedback on my ideas by sharing on Twitter and Instagram, but the most meaningful interactions have been with those that are active in the fxhash community. I have shared code and had it corrected on Discord. I’ve asked questions of amazing artists that have been successful on fxhash about color palettes, composition, or algorithms. I have always gotten a helpful response. Artists care about other artists. There are some incredible student artists out there that just don’t know about the opportunities they could have with the right support.

This isn’t to say that fxhash needs to stop doing what it is doing or change what it is. I view fxhash as an example of what is different about web3: creating value and ownership of that value that is independent of any service or platform. Fxhash offers a relatively easy way to have an identity as a creator in the web3 space. This will go a long way to changing the perception that what we can do here is about nothing more than trading NFTs of profile pictures and hoping for a bull market on a particular coin.

I hope we can start a conversation on building pathways that help students join the generative art world of fxhash. With so many artists, so many ideas, and consistent investment back in the community happening every day, I see this as an untapped resource. Let’s talk.