13-year-old DAO founder: Web3 cured my "mourning"

Carry condenses the rebellion of many adolescent children, and was once an "Internet addict". She regained her confidence from the creation of SparkrDAO. Now, the boy wants to help the boy.

Written by: Mu Mu

"I see everyone is dead, everyone stands up and moves." In April, a salon at the Web3 Carnival in Hong Kong, the orange knitted hat brought a touch of color to the dark scene. 13-year-old Carry Zheng wore it on the stage. No Greetings of "Hello everyone" directly issued instructions to the adults in the audience, "Don't be like an old man, stand up and do stretching."

She is creating SparkrDAO, an organization that gathers young people, and was invited to be a guest of this salon. She is probably the youngest entrepreneur participating in the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. DAO is a popular organizational form in the Web3 world. It advocates decentralization and openness. Everyone can initiate and join.

Carry's SparkrDAO focuses on the learning and education of young people, "learn the knowledge and skills that you are interested in but are not taught in school, or are not taught well." In a normal speech, she held the audience in English, with an audience in the audience Whispered to the people next to him, "This is not an ordinary child, he has seen the world at first glance." Someone speculated, "It must be a schoolmaster."

"Upper mid-range", this is Carry's self-evaluation of school performance. In the eyes of her mother, she is not a "student master", but she does not discipline her with her grades, but also opens the door to Web3 for her, encouraging her to turn her interest in drawing into NFT works.

From her younger brother being labeled as a "poor student" and being marginalized in school, from her thinking about "why she doesn't like music class", and from her classmates saying "I won't use trigonometric functions when buying vegetables in the future", she found that, Many teenagers around her have lost their motivation to learn knowledge and skills because they are "not interested" and "feel useless".

She wanted to use a non-traditional new technology like Web3 and a non-mainstream organization like DAO to change these status quo, and she was gradually changed.

Carry condenses the rebellion of many adolescent children. They were once "Internet addicts". They hate schools that judge success or failure based on grades. Secondary harm, and the outside world offers them few ways to escape harm, and they need help when they are in trouble.

Carry came out of the woods with the encouragement of her parents and found her confidence back from the creation of SparkrDAO. Now, the boy wants to help the boy.

Original intention: "Tear off the label of "poor student" for my brother"

If SparkrDAO had to have a mission, I wanted it to be a place for teens to practice their personal interests. Here, everyone can learn the knowledge they are interested in, such as the popular AI, Web3, and NFT. Anyway, it is to learn the skills and techniques you want to learn, or art, and then find your own "light". Just like the name Spark of this DAO, everyone who joins it can release sparks and be inspired.

Encouragement is really important to teenagers. A child's bright spots are discovered and encouraged by others, which will really change him, at least he will not be entangled in inferiority complex. This is my experience, as well as my brother's.

The direct reason that triggered me to do SparkrDAO was my brother, he was too miserable.

He has ADHD, it is difficult to concentrate on things, and his grades are not good. He is a "problem student" who is difficult to manage by the teacher and will be excluded by some classmates. When he was in grade 5, his class required him to bring a shirt for his teacher and classmates to sign. He cried when he got home, saying that no one was willing to sign his shirt, not even the teacher.

In the end, I asked all the classmates in my class to help him sign, even the security guards and neighbors in our community signed, and he got temporary comfort.

Whether it is "student master" or "poor student", this is a unique label in the school system, and grades cannot represent all of a child. My brother's academic performance is not good, but his creativity in art has not been discovered by teachers and classmates. He was interested in music, so he took the initiative to learn. But my brother is bound by the label of "poor student".

What else can I do to tear off these tags from school for my brother? I think of the school Ad Astra founded by Elon Musk (Editor's note: a non-profit experimental school located in the SpaceX headquarters park, enrolling children aged 7-14, Musk's sons, children of some SpaceX employees and the Los Angeles area Some of the other students in the school go to this school, the school focuses on mathematics, science, engineering and ethics education, no music, physical education and other subjects, the language class is reduced to the edge, less homework, no grading system, students can not study subjects that they are not interested in ).

I can't run a school, but I can start an organization where creative teenagers like my brother can communicate, learn and gain confidence. The younger brother is now the creative director of SparkrDAO, and he has provided the team with many interesting ideas.

SparkrDAO is also interest-oriented. In my opinion, interest is the driving force behind learning.

Take me for example, I am not a top student, my grades are in the upper-middle class, and my partial subjects are serious. All subjects can be kept above the pass line. I can get full marks in science, art, and physical education. These subjects require me to use my brain and hands. If you are interested, you will put in the time. But for music and geography, for example, if it wasn’t for the teacher I like to teach, and there are exams, and the grades will be used as an evaluation for further education, I might not even want to pass.

Carry draws two of her favorite sports as NFTs

In addition to interests, what I choose to learn will also depend on whether certain knowledge or skills are useful to me. There are some subjects taught in schools that may never be used again except for exams. For example, music, I like to listen to music, but do I really need to mark notes on a piece of paper? I don't intend to be a musician in the future. Even if I want to learn music, can the teacher finish teaching the knowledge of music theory and encourage everyone to make a piece of music, but no, I still have to use a piece of paper to take the test, which is very boring.

I thought it was just me thinking so. Once, I heard a classmate complain about the math class, "When I grow up, I won't use trigonometric functions when I buy groceries." Wow, there are people who think about the practicality of knowledge just like me. If you want to do science work in the future, then mathematics is the foundation, and you will be motivated to learn. But he may not engage in scientific research, then he will feel useless.

Are there many people with this idea? I was very curious, so I interviewed the classmates around me, and found that many people "felt useless" because they lacked the motivation to learn some courses, and they lost their minds when they took courses they didn't like. I don't get it, why should we waste our time on courses that are not of interest and may not be used in the future?

The school I attend is an international school in Hong Kong, and English is considered a daily communication language. From the perspective of outsiders, it should be very advanced and open. It does take into account both openness and tradition, but it cannot break away from the traditional examination-based education system. One can imagine the situation of other local schools.

Of course, I understand the purpose of setting up general education courses in schools during the basic education period. In addition to teaching basic knowledge, it is necessary for students to discover what they like or are good at in various subjects. However, the setting of the exam makes it impossible for us to reject what we don't like and what we are not good at, nor can we specialize in what we are really interested in and hope to make achievements.

Most of the current courses are for us to sit on chairs and write papers. If the starting point is to cultivate interest, can the school make the courses more interesting and let everyone practice more. Moreover, the evolution of schooling has been slow. The modern education system emerged after the industrial revolution. Think about it, what was the car like before? What is the car like now? But the classroom remained the same.

ChatGPT has come out, do schools have to keep up with the pace, think about how to prevent students from being eliminated by AI when they grow up? As a result, they specially developed a set of tools to detect whether students use ChatGPT for homework.

Banning students from using GPT does no good at all. In my opinion, schools should teach students how to use AI well. For example, how to ask ChatGPT questions to get good answers? Guide students to think about whether the answer given by AI must be correct? How to use AI to realize your creativity? Creativity is what humans have but AI does not have!

Therefore, I launched SparkrDAO not to fight against school education, but to complement it. It is decentralized, and it is open to all teenagers who can think independently and have ideas, so that creativity can be applied. If what you are doing is promising and can become a project independently, SparkrDAO can provide you with resources, funds, and technical support.

Change: "I found my own light by doing something I'm interested in"

The SparkrDAO initial team already has 5 people. Except for my younger brother and I, one is an adult partner who mainly provides technical support and is a friend of my mother; the other two partners are also teenagers, one is 12 years old, and he is very technical and creative. There is also a 15-year-old who has created a fund of 2 million US dollars. He is also working on other Web3 projects and has a lot of experience.

The process of raising SparkrDAO changed me a lot because it required me to face and deal with a lot of things alone. Although my mother is also a Web3 practitioner, she doesn't give me money. At most, she can help me introduce some people who can help me do this.

So if you want funds, you have to figure out your own way. I applied for the ThielFellowship, a foundation dedicated to helping young people under the age of 22 start their own businesses. If the application is approved, I can get about $100,000 in two years to support the early investment of SparkrDAO. I will also meet some Web3 investors.

SparkrDAO must have an operating system, such as organizational rules, development routes, and how to use blockchain smart contracts to implement governance, so I am currently learning Solidity (Editor's Note: The programming language of Ethereum smart contracts). Now that ChatGPT has appeared, if you want to deal with computers, you have to learn their language. This is like when you go to the United States, it is difficult to quickly understand everything there without knowing English.

In order to get more good advice, I also need to collect ideas from experienced people and find more like-minded people to cooperate with, which forces me to meet and communicate with all kinds of people. I can learn with interest as my driving force, but communicating with others is actually a big challenge for me.

I am very introverted. If I appear in a photo, I will be afraid of being caught. I will never stand there to pose for a photo if it is not necessary, because it feels awkward. I used to be too shy to talk to others proactively. When I have conflicts with my parents, I will only avoid them and never communicate directly.

Especially during the epidemic period, we were locked up at home and took online classes, and all the communication with teachers and classmates was online, which was very cool and saved a lot of social troubles. But the problem soon appeared. I was addicted to the game, playing "Minecraft", and I didn't take the online class well.

In order to monitor me, my mother put two cameras in the room. I turned the camera towards the wall and continued playing. Because of playing games, my mother and I often quarreled, and my mother dropped my computer.

Later she changed her strategy and simply let me play. I don't know what happened, but I gradually lost interest in the game, and even regretted arguing with my mother because of the game, so I took the initiative to apologize to her and communicate with her. That was the first time I knew the importance of communication.

Now I can't avoid communication even more. As a SparkrDAO, I need to meet people to find a partner, and I have to explain my project to others in order to win funds, and most of the time the other party is an adult. At first, I was very nervous making introductions to them, terrified of not performing well. Later, I did mental construction for myself: I am still a 13-year-old child, as long as I can express my thoughts clearly.

Carry stood on stage to introduce her project SparkrDAO

I discovered that starting a business has a thick skin. Gradually, I was no longer afraid, and I even saw the admiration in the eyes of the adults, and the confidence came immediately. I can now speak in front of a lot of people, something I would never have volunteered to do before.

Another change is that I feel the urgency of time more and more, or the sense of competition has become stronger. My mom herself takes our time management very seriously, and she requires us to be efficient. What really made me feel that "there is not much time left for me" was in March this year, when my mother took me to a Web3 hackathon held in Denver, USA.

I met a 12-year-old boy there. We had three kids form a team and compete with others to create projects. Throughout the process of cooperation, I found that he and I have similar interests. His skills and ideas are very good, although we did not end up Win, but he made me feel the urgency. He's only 12, and I'm a year older than him, and I'm likely to be beaten by someone like that in the future.

Later, when I started SparkrDAO, I "robbed" him and invited him to be my partner. He is now a founding member of our team.

Doing SparkrDAO is something I am interested in. I devoted my time to it, learned the knowledge and skills to make it possible, and found my own light. I am more confident than before, and the recognition I got is my All the full marks obtained are incomparable.

You have to know that self-confidence is never "boasted" by others, it comes from the sense of accomplishment you get after putting yourself into doing things.

Expectation: "Generation Z is not all Web3 natives, it is those who contribute"

SparkrDAO is not yet open to the public at this stage, and there are still many frameworks and products in production. We will have an application, which is an entry, and the first version will be completed in November.

I don't know how many people will join it when it opens, but I hope that my peers will join it because they really believe in its concept and have a real idea to realize it. So I am not going to take the initiative to promote it to my classmates. I want to make SparkrDAO known on a larger scale. If my classmates see it and are willing to join it, of course I welcome it.

In addition, not taking the initiative is also related to the label attached to Web3.

I've personally had some sense of accomplishment in Web3, but it's not likely that others will see the same appeal. I came into contact with Web3 because of my mother, her work is related to it, and I like to draw, she encouraged me to create works as NFT, so I have to learn how to use Ethereum network, encrypted wallet, encrypted assets to create NFT .

NFT avatar designed by Carry

But the circle of Web3 is actually very small. In schools, blockchain, Bitcoin, and NFT are not known to most people. Those who know them will say it is a "scam", not as some publicity said. "Generation Z" readily accepts it.

I remember one time, my mother’s friend was doing a market research on NFT social platforms, because many NFT applications would regard “Generation Z” as the aboriginals of Web3, that friend hoped that I could help to go to the school to do a research, I agreed. As a result, some students thought that I had fallen into an encryption scam, and some even thought that I was a "liar".

I explained that "Web3 is not a scam", but few students and classmates are willing to really study it. I will use my pocket money to invest in Bitcoin. Apart from my mother’s reason, it is also because my brother and I are allowed to invest in stocks at home. Whether it is stocks or Bitcoin, I don’t like to speculate, more is Buy some when the price is low.

If you know what inflation is, saving money is definitely not the best option.

But these are not things that my peers have to get. Everyone still has to spend more time on schoolwork. SparkrDAO itself is different from the tradition. It needs teenagers who can break the inherent thinking in Web2 and Web3. They are more willing to try new things, and they are more likely to accept SparkrDAO, an organization that requires self-driving force.

I also wonder why so many people think Web3 is a scam. I think that's because it's so close to the money.

Therefore, I will keep SparkrDAO away from money. It will definitely not issue any tokens in the early and mid-term. My partners and I have reached a consensus that money is not the purpose of SparkrDAO, not from the beginning. It started out as my way of helping my brother, and I hope it will help more teens like me and my brother.

If I have to talk about the actual benefits to me personally, my big friends reminded me that being a SparkrDAO is a good "story" and will help me add a beautiful resume when I apply for university. I think that is also good, but the premise is not "beautiful"? This requires SparkrDAO to really become a DAO with people joining, building and even producing results.

Many people will say that "post-00s" and "post-10s" are the aborigines of Web3, but I think that the Z generation who have not contributed to Web3 are not really aboriginals. Just like I can use various applications of Web2 now, but I have not developed a product or a bottom layer. I am just a Web2 user, and I use 99% of the Internet instead of mastering 1% of it.

Web3 is different. It allows you to realize your creativity on a public network. If you can draw and make music, you can turn your work into NFT; if you can write programs, you can also try it on it. There are still many The space needs innovation, and there are great opportunities. If you want to change something with Web3, then you have a very good chance of doing that 1%. For example, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, I think he is the native of Web3.

So I really want to say to some teenagers who have heard of Web3 but haven't come yet, don't get in touch with Web3 just because of speculation, if you are curious about it, then you try to get in touch with it, use it, develop the skills you have, you will Discover its true charm. It's no fun living if you're not curious about anything.