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I tried to listen to the majority of day 0 of Polkadot so far and here are a few additional questions, and comments that could be incorporated in the slides next time:

• A diagram showing a spectrum where one end is smart contract or bitcoin script and another end is a (system) parachains. Importantly, where would you place parathreads in there?

• What host functions do parachains have access to? Is there a process to ask for new host functions? Or is it just fixed forever?

• Can’t we also add some kind of dank-sharding, where all nodes participate in data-availability, next to validators, sort of as backup?

• Nested relay chain idea is still out there a lot. Why is it not viable?

Generalizing students feedback so far:

• Compilation takes too long. Need to provide instructions with how to build all needed binaries at least 1 day prior to the exercise.
• Content was delivered too fast. Too many new concepts per minute.
• Some redundancy in explanations might help. If something was missed, there's no way of understanding the concept anymore during the lecture.

It is starting to become more clear to me at least that the target audience for this content needs to be defined: are we trying to train Polkadot core engineers here? I think rather it's parachain engineers. So more focus on cumulus would be good IMHO. I will need to recap on materials I missed in the video to give more concrete feedback.

Ideas for polish on things to refine the hands-on fun stuff :partying_face: :

• protocolId mentioned sometime in the Substrate lectures in the context of networking and stressing that this is needed for not getting conflicting networks @BradleyOlson64 - you have a guide from Ricardo now I think?

• setup a hosted relay chain like in the PoW activity that everyone peers with for the auction games, we have 75+ students bid on slots

  • have everyone get acquainted with generation and management of keys ala https://docs.substrate.io/tutorials/get-started/add-trusted-nodes/ - perhaps in the FRAME mod.
  • practice parachain testnets locally to practice setup manually of a testnet first (not zombinet)
  • pre-activity in class, everyone submits keys that wants to play as a validator (optionally)

  (more ideas welcome, and I would love to help assist in creating this before the next wave BTW!)