Teaching Business to High School Students

How can you teach business principles to high school students? It is so far from the experience of high school students and their teachers, that it is difficult to imagine how students can obtain direct exposure to the issues that businessmen face every day.

Fortunately, many high school students are exposed to massive online gaming, and are used to the challenge and excitement of working with other people their own age around their world through their broadband connection. Such games as Halo, Age of Fantasy and the like allow teenagers to interact to resolve issues with people they’ve never met.

Working with online business simulation.

Up to the present day, there were few options available to teenagers wanting to learn about business. About the only option available was online Monopoly with up to four participants—a game developed in the 1930’s, and hardly a learning tool to prepare teenagers for the challenges of modern business life.

During the same time that social sites were building (My Space, the Sims, and others), there were no sites that gave students the ‘real’ feeling of business simulation. The technology was built apace, but the elements of fun and mass participation didn’t seem to be available.

Business is about collaboration and team-building.

Business simulation needs to have a strong human component in order to be successful. Fred Xue, the founder of www.informatist.net , responded to this issue as he and his colleagues looked for ways to teach business to high school and college students. “We were genuinely puzzled at the lack of teaching tools for students to learn business,” he said. “We knew that business problems require interaction, and our idea was to use the tools developed for massive online gaming to introduce business principles to students.”

We learn through playing.

What children call ‘playing’ is actually hard-wired into our mental architecture, and allows us to learn while having fun at the same time. It is clear that students are exposed to business principles by rote, with dry presentation of business law, accounting and business analysis that, while accurate, does little to expose the student to the real-world lessons of the world.

Young children play together for hours at a time. They are learning social interaction and relating with others. High school and college students do the same thing with their collaborative courses. While children call this ‘playing,’ society terms what we do in school ‘learning.’ There’s not much difference between the two.

Business Simulation s Provide Real-World Experience.

Playing a business simulation game, such as www.informatist.net, gives students the ability to learn the principles of business while, at the same time, having a chance to socialize with people they’ve never met before. This parallels the experience that students have during a 2-year course of MBA business, in which students collaborate to come up with good business solutions in competition with other groups which are trying to succeed in resolving business problems. ‘Playing’ a business game is actually a great way to learn how business really works.