Dear Community Members,
I’m thrilled to share that this week marks the rollout of several exciting updates, and I’m confident that you’ll appreciate them. Our focus is always on delivering high quality simulations that reflect real-life business scenarios, and we believe that this Community Update #12: February reflects that focus.
Below you will find a change-log of the updates in version 8.3.50+ of the Startup Wars platform. These Community Updates #12 have improved the capabilities for both instructors and students alike; and are designed to help simplify the entrepreneurship education process.
Community Updates #12: For Educators
Vertical Farming Simulation Announced! (Fall Semester) 🌱
- ⏱ Elapsed Time: Added “Elapsed Time” on the instructor portal so that you can see how long a student has spent on each attempt.
- 📚 Activity Log Details: Additional information on each student’s Activity Log has been introduced so that students and instructors can more thoroughly analyze which decisions were made on each day
- 🔍 Attempt Search: Introduced new capabilities to make it easier to search for student attempts via the instructor portal. Now, you can see all attempts by students on the Students Tab with more detailed information.
Updates for Students
New Content & Platform Updates
- 💲 Material Prices: In each simulation (with materials), the price of materials have been adjusted to approach a closer approximation to averaged real-life amounts (across various cities).
- 🛠️ Build & Shipping Times: In each simulation, the game engine has been adjusted to allow more incremental build and shipping times. Correspondingly, build times for certain products have been reduced to a more granular level of averaged ‘accuracy’. For example, on the T-Shirt simulation the time required to package a product has now been reduced to between 3-6 minutes, and the simulation has been rebalanced accordingly.
- 🛒 Customer Orders & Quantity: We’ve added the ability for customers to purchase multiple products in a single order. The number of products purchased is determined by a formula to approximate some ‘randomness’ in customer behavior
- 📱 Tablet Support: Added additional support for tablet browser support to enhance student experience on tablets. This was a necessary update to match new releases from google chrome.
There were also a number of other (minor) updates across the board, but we believe these changes provide the high level updates for February.
🚀 The Product Roadmap - What's Next?
We’ve been receiving a ton of requests – so first off, THANK YOU everyone for your tremendous support of the Startup Wars platform. Software like this is complex and it takes time (there are thousands of possible outcomes for each simulation at this point), so we appreciate everyone’s patience as we steadily get through our roadmap and backlog.
Our next release (early March) is scheduled to contain:
📲 Modal UI Updates: We’ve been working hard to make all of the pop-up modals more responsive and easier to read, especially on smaller devices (such as Mac 13 inch, or Tablets). These updates have been extensive, and we believe will make a great user experience improvement.
📖 Content, Content, Content! Currently, the primary differences between the difficulties in each simulation (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) are the available cities. Beginner has the lowest cost of living cities, and Advanced has the highest. These affect the difficulty as the Cost of Living affects employee salaries, rent, and the city populations affect the marketing campaigns.
March will see a series of major content updates to provide significantly more difference between each difficulty level. Different events, different production times, more obstacles in the founder’s way, etc. It will be a major update; and we’ve been testing content heavily behind the scenes to make sure the balancing stays intact.
📊 Instructor Analytics & Data: On this community Update #12: February we released an MVP in December for instructor analytics and we received some great feedback; so we’re in the process of revamping these capabilities to give instructors more visibility about the simulation differences, student attempts, best strategies, best attempts, and more.
That’s it for now ladies and gentlemen! Stay tuned for more updates; and if you have any questions, requests, or would like more detail about the changes simply reply to this email and one of our team members would be happy to assist!
Best Regards,
Jedidiah Weller & The Startup Wars Team
