Overview
Gimbalabs Dev Platform is a set of project-based coding courses that teach developers to build blockchain applications by making them. It suits programmers who learn best by doing, with lessons broken into small hands-on tasks such as connecting a wallet, minting a token, or reading data from the blockchain1.
The platform is the developer-learning side of Gimbalabs, a community lab that began as a place to learn Cardano by building2. Its flagship course, Plutus Project-Based Learning (PPBL), is free for anyone who wants to build applications on Cardano3. Companion courses cover Aiken and Go, and both are hosted on Andamio, an open protocol for interoperable credentials4.
Key Features
- A guided path to a first working app. Plutus PBL modules cover building transactions with Mesh, a TypeScript toolkit for Cardano apps, then minting tokens and NFTs and querying the blockchain, each with a live example learners can try by connecting a wallet1.
- Smart contract lessons in Aiken. Aiken Project-Based Learning, from Gimbalabs and SIDAN Lab, a Cardano development tooling team, teaches Aiken, a language for writing smart contracts, the programs that run on the blockchain and enforce its rules4.
- Small, clearly defined skills. The Aiken course is organized into modules of Student Learning Targets, each a specific skill paired with a written lesson and an assignment that checks what the learner picked up5.
- Cardano development in Go. Cardano Go Project-Based Learning teaches Go programmers to use Bursa, a Cardano wallet library; Apollo, a library for constructing Cardano transactions; and Adder, a tool that emits an event for each block and transaction it sees. The course is a collaboration with Blink Labs, a Cardano infrastructure engineering team, funded through Project Catalyst (Cardano's community grant program)6.
- Practice code you can reuse. Gimbalabs publishes the Aiken PBL student examples on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 open-source license, with tests named after each module and learning target so learners can check one skill at a time7.
What to Expect
Newcomers to blockchain development can start at the Plutus PBL site. The live examples page asks you to connect a Cardano wallet, then steps through modules from Getting Started to blockchain queries1. One early lesson asks learners to add a personal goal to a public Student Goals page, so you can see what other students set out to build8.
Developers who already write code can go straight to the Andamio course catalog, which lists Aiken Project-Based Learning, Cardano Go Project-Based Learning, and a Getting Started at Gimbalabs course alongside courses from other teams4.
Gimbalabs lists its current community meetings on a public calendar, and meeting links are shared in its Discord. Recordings of past sessions, including earlier Plutus PBL live coding, are on the Gimbalabs YouTube channel3.
Students who need live blockchain data for a project can use Dandelion, a community-run set of Cardano APIs (connection points that let an app read network data) led by Gimbalabs. Anyone can also run a private copy with the Dandelion Lite setup scripts9.
