Chevron Left
Back to Smart Contracts

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Smart Contracts by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
2,263 ratings

About the Course

This second course of the Blockchain specialization will help you design, code, deploy and execute a smart contract – the computational element of the blockchain technology. Smart contracts allow for implementing user-defined operations of arbitrary complexity that are not possible through plain cryptocurrency protocols. They allow users to implement conditions, rules and policies of the domain applications. Smart contracts are a powerful feature that, when properly designed and coded, can result in autonomous, efficient and transparent systems. You will design and program smart contracts in Solidity language, test and deploy them in the Remix development environment, and invoke them from a simple web interface that Remix provides. This course features best practices for designing solutions with smart contracts using Solidity and Remix IDE. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises....

Top reviews

DM

Dec 17, 2019

Excellent course! Provided a good overview of how smart contracts adds a layer of value to the evolution in blockchain technology. The hands on programming experience was quite helpful as well.

HT

Apr 8, 2019

Thank you; excellent starting point so I can have a good foundation to learn more Solidity programming; the discussion forum is helpful when I submit the code at the end of the project.

Filter by:

1 - 25 of 446 Reviews for Smart Contracts

By Zhangyi

•

Jun 17, 2018

The lecture is good.However the quiz is far from adequate. The instructor should at least quadruple the number of quiz problems and add at least one programming assignment for each week. The current exercise is barely scratching the surface. At the end, the course is allowing the students to get perfect scores without being able to implement a real smart contract from the scratch independently. The certificate on this course can only serve as a proof of interest in blockchain tech, instead of proof of competence.

By Aniket B

•

Sep 12, 2019

Outdated, code never works... demo screens are super outdated... the transcript has errors, explanation is super high level and instructor skips lots of steps...

By fabrizio f

•

Nov 22, 2018

I am not seeing improvement from the prior course in the quality of the presentation.

The design of this course can use a lot of UX help. Way too much reading from dry and definitional notes.

So far is poorly designed and executed. It should make more use of visual aids and make the slides/material available for download and review. There is no point of watching an instructor reading from definitions and reference manuals or academic-sounding papers. Please review how Andrew NG approaches the courses on Machine Learning and Deep Learning. I would expect much better quality from a very lively topic like Blockchain with more direct real life applications.

I start wondering if this course worth worth my time and money....

By Joerg F

•

Apr 7, 2021

Well, I am not sure what the goal of this course should be. Yes, you learn something basic about Smart Contracts and you learn something about Solidity but what you absolutely do not learn is how you would get it to run in the real Ethereum blockchain. All the concepts of Gas, mining costs and fees are not covered at all. The didacticts of the woman presenting the course is just bad. It seems, she is reading here whole text from the teleprompter, there are no pauses, just rare examples and her look just away from the camera is disturbing.

The links to further material often do not exist anymore, the real reading times vary from 10 minutes to one hour, but are ALWAYS listed with 10 minutes.

Most of the test questions are a joke, the final programming submission cover things never mentioned in this course.

Summarized: Looks like the course has been created quick & dirty and was neither updated nor verified once the course was uploaded.

By Nicholas D R C

•

Aug 20, 2018

Similar to my previous review, for an intro to Smart Contract basics, I believe this course is 5 out of 5. You cannot rate it for wanting it to be more than it really suggests or pretends to be. This course will not get you job ready to start creating Smart Contracts in the real world AND it is not designed to be that. It provides a solid overview of the framework and basic understanding of the design, development and testing of smart contracts using the Remix IDE - that's it! If you are expecting more - the course also provides relevant links to all the documentation and resources required in order to write your own contracts, however, you will have to put in the work in order to do so.

By Samuel Y

•

Jun 3, 2019

Though the course explained how to use Remix IDE well, I would prefer it more if it explained different concepts of Solidity more thoroughly. Watching YouTube videos or taking another course is absolutely necessary if wanting to learn Solidity well. This course is also a bit outdated and needs to be updated to support newer compiler versions of Solidity.

By DIVYANG M

•

Jun 15, 2020

It was a really bad experience, the instructor seems to be reading everything from the screen placed near the camera, and there was no clear explanation,

By Arun K S

•

May 21, 2019

Thanks , it was very helpful.

Just a feedback - VM is good but there should be a way to work with ubuntu machine directly

By Umair U I

•

Mar 1, 2023

Overall, I found the Smart Contract section of the Blockchain course to be informative and useful. However, there were a few areas where I felt the course could be improved. Firstly, the reading materials provided were quite lengthy and, at times, difficult to follow. I think that shorter, more concise articles would be more effective in helping students grasp complex concepts.

Another area for improvement is the course content itself. The current version of Solidity is 0.8.19, while the course focused on version 0.4.17. Some of the keywords have been changed, like now is replaced by block.timestamp. I believe that updating the course content to reflect the latest version of Solidity would be beneficial to students.I think that more practical tutorials and examples would be helpful.

Overall, I would recommend the Smart Contract section of the Blockchain course to anyone interested in developing blockchain-based applications. With some minor improvements, I believe that this course has the potential to be even more effective in helping students learn and apply the concepts of Smart Contracts.

By Wolfgang K

•

Sep 6, 2021

Great content but was unable to do the Quizzes as the remix environment looks different and is hard to work with without further reference/instruction. I will not continue with the course.

By Martin M

•

Jun 23, 2018

In this course I really learned something. Even as an IT pro with programming background it takes some thinking to get the Smart Contract concepts. Looking forward to the next courses.

By Arijit N

•

Jan 12, 2019

Great course for the beginners. Its gives an overview of smart contract, Solidity , Remix IDE. it definitely gives a lot of confidence to the trainee upon completion of the course.

By Marco F

•

May 27, 2019

Very good experience, I found a lot of informations and sources to improve my knoledge - thankyou

By Anthony A

•

Aug 11, 2020

Videos far too short and superficial. The student needs to be given many, very small coding assignments to learn all the relevant keywords to use on the final project.

By Karina M

•

Jun 7, 2021

The videos were good, the quizzes were also good but not all the activities worked. No way to get additional help. There is no way to get help and the course is really outdated.

By Utkarsh S

•

Jun 6, 2020

The course is good but the content to read is too less to understand everything. It becomes a necessity for a person to refer to a different source like Youtube.

By Ashwin J

•

Jan 16, 2020

The instructor does not know what she is doing or saying. She does not explain the concepts properly. This course is useless. I would expect a refund.

By Jordi C

•

Sep 3, 2018

Passing this course is all based on completing a programming assigment in Week 4. If you fail that assigment you will fail the course. So, if you don't have a programming background and/or interest in learning to develop smart contracts (not simply understanding their role and use) then you might struggle at the very end. I feel that this should have been made clear in the course description; I want to learn about Blockchain but have little to no interest in becoming a smart contract developer (for which this course will not prepare you, anyway).

By Dipayan M

•

Dec 18, 2019

Excellent course! Provided a good overview of how smart contracts adds a layer of value to the evolution in blockchain technology. The hands on programming experience was quite helpful as well.

By Hieu T

•

Apr 9, 2019

Thank you; excellent starting point so I can have a good foundation to learn more Solidity programming; the discussion forum is helpful when I submit the code at the end of the project.

By Azra P

•

Aug 16, 2020

Excellent. Very structured and step by step approach helps to learn the concepts easily.

Really like Mam's explanation approach very clear and systematic with simple English

By TEK K

•

Sep 5, 2019

I was once lost on what is a smart contract, now, its more clear. I am more educated thanks to these very insightful videos and word for word explanations of the videos!

By Bill L

•

Aug 20, 2019

Lecture videos differ greatly from what the development environment shows. Very difficult to follow.

Instructor assumes students are experts in LINUX, often glossing over basic issues on the IDE environment, and the Virtual Machine.

By Fabio P

•

Jun 19, 2022

The course is a little bit outdated. Especially the interaction with the IDE is really different nowadays, and some significant changes have happened in solidity programming

By Deepika

•

Mar 20, 2022

The course is on very old version of solidity. A lot of them is not applicable to how we code in the recent version.