2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Blockchain technology is expected to change the way we conduct and manage contracts and transactions between individuals and/or organizations from being highly centralized (through agencies) to being de-centralized (directly between the interested parties and communities). In the implementation of this technology for public use, once a chain is created (through the generation of a genesis/root block), no one has access to modifying the genesis block itself. Participants can of course add additional blocks to the chain but not modify them once validated. This has been a challenge to those educators and students who are interested in experimenting with the inner workings of the Blockchain technology towards a better understanding and a deeper level of mastery. This is especially true when it comes to the development and delivery of meaningful and effective lab exercises on the Blockchain Consensus Algorithms adopted by platform such as Ethereum at the undergraduate level .

In this paper, we present significant enhancements we recently developed and introduced into our Ethereum private blockchain platform on which was previously reported. The main focus of these enhancements is to ensure that our private platform offers an instructional experience that exposes key behaviors and mechanisms of the public platform but with the ability to configure the platform for different users and nodes interaction scenarios from the genesis block onwards as desired. For example, we have enhanced it so that each node belongs to a different network and introduced the boot node to demonstrate how the full and light nodes are discovered and interact with each other through the underlining peer-to-peer network infrastructure. Also, rather than having the same node serve multiple roles, we dedicated separate nodes (on different network) in support of the different types of nodes. These enhancements enable the students to experiment with the PoW consensus algorithm and peer-to-peer network infrastructure. Another critical enhancement is the ability to capture and parse the Ethereum messages exchanged among involved nodes using available Wireshark dissector.

In this paper, we present the new enhancements and how interested educators and students could build their own Ethereum private blockchain platform based on a well-designed, implemented and tested by our undergraduate student’s lab instructions. These are highly flexible and customizable that we believe that interested parties will be able to conduct their own experimentation and develop their own exercises . We share how we applied the enhanced Ethereum private framework in the implementation and delivery of additional lab exercises with special focus on demonstrating how consensus algorithms (such as proof of work) are utilized by Ethereum blockchain.