Bitcoin Basics · For teachers
Lesson notes for every episode
Each Bitcoin Basics episode is a cartoon of about 90 seconds, short enough to open a class. Its teacher page adds a warm-up question, three discussion questions, a five-question exit quiz with an answer key, key terms, the matching national standard (personal finance or economics), and further reading.
- Grades 9–12
- Free to use in class
- No sign-up
- Prints cleanly
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What Is Money, Anyway?
Students learn the three jobs money does (trade, saving and measuring), what people have used as money over 3,000 years, and why money ultimately rests on trust.
Economics Standard 11 -
The Problem Bitcoin Solves
Students learn why digital money can't simply be copied, how banks stop the same money being spent twice by keeping the record, and the different fix bitcoin proposed in 2008, with its trade-offs.
Saving 12-3b -
What Is a Blockchain?
Students learn what a blockchain is: a notebook of payments where each page carries a code made from the page before, kept and checked by many computers, so old pages are very hard to change.
Spending 12-9c -
What Is Mining?
Students learn how bitcoin mining works as a guessing lottery: the winner adds the next page and earns new bitcoin, the network adjusts the difficulty to keep the pace, and the work protects the record at a real energy cost.
Economics Standard 4 -
The 21 Million Rule
Students learn how bitcoin's supply schedule works: a new block about every 10 minutes, a reward that halves every 210,000 blocks, and a total that flattens just under 21 million, enforced by the network's rules.
Economics Standard 11
The episodes explain how bitcoin works and where the numbers come from. They never predict prices or give advice, and where there is a debate they give both sides. Questions or classroom feedback: hello@thesteadyblock.com.