There’s no shortage of NFT news these days. Just this week we told you Qantas was launching its own, um, range, and that CPU giant AMD misjudged its audience by announcing a partnership with an NFT crew. But today, we bring you a Brisbane school capitalising on the NFT craze.
That’s right, a Brisbane school has launched NFTs to “build students’ digital portfolios”. St Paul’s School in Bald Hills says making a token non-fungible is part of a “continued focus on innovation and preparing students for a changing world”.
They’ve got the second part correct. Tech is changing at lightning-speed and education needs to catch up. But not sure an NFT is the best approach.
The Brissy school has minted the NFTs and transferred ownership to the top six students from last year’s graduating class in recognition of their academic performance.
According to the school: “The new NFTs continue St Paul’s School’s determination to explore changing trends which helped to spark its Centre for Innovators and Entrepreneurs, a unique working space that has already helped birth brilliant ideas from the school’s young minds”.
Each NFT depicts a unique design of the schools ‘Realms of Thinking’. A what now?
While on a blockchain and unique and owned by an individual and holding every other characteristic of an NFT, what the school is actually doing doesn’t need to be an NFT, it could just be a digital ‘award thing’. But alas.
“St Paul’s School provides an education worth having which prepares resilient global citizens who are innovative thinkers. Right now, an education worth having includes engagement with this fast-developing world of blockchain and NFTs,” St Paul’s School headmaster Dr Paul Browning says.
“These concepts didn’t even exist when some of our senior students started school but now they’re becoming commonplace.”
St Paul’s says it isn’t aware of any other Australian school producing NFTs but said it recognises the growing importance for students to build their digital portfolio before they graduate.
“By creating these NFTs and transferring them to our best-performing students, we help them to add to a digital portfolio that is becoming more commonplace,” Browning adds.
Happy Friday!