Hey everyone,

Thanks again for another successful semester and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with everyone this year!

As anticipated, this spring we finished another successful round of iteration and engagement with students and faculty across the east coast and we’ve finally had a chance to go through all the amazing feedback and start implementing some of the requests from our community members!

For this community update, we’ll be focusing on the results of the spring term and some of the next steps for the Startup Wars Simulation platform.

Without further ado, let’s dig right in!

Student Engagement & Feedback

The results speak for themselves – across the board, we’ve seen that 67.6% of all students surveyed (397) enjoyed playing the Startup Wars entrepreneurship game more than any other entrepreneurship simulation game they’ve played in college.  This, shows that thanks to the hard work of our team, our faculty community members and students we have been able to year after year really hone in on the SUW experience and make this an enjoyable game for everyone who’s played SUW.

As stated by Sydney Ankrim (a student from Ohio State who gave us permission to quote his response):

“Startup Wars was one of the first learning tools where I forgot that I was learning. You almost feel as though you are playing a game and trying to reach the next level, but in order to do so you must have significant foundational knowledge regarding how to be a successful entrepreneur.”

Thank you Syndey, you rock!

New Layout for Learning Modules

One of the latest updates that was used by teachers in this spring term’s class was the 3 panel layout with tutorials.   You can see an example of this here in our new Human Resources Module.

The new layout allows for students to have easy explanations from the in-game characters on how to use each learning module, and what they’ll gain out of it.

Graded Attempts

We also launched the first version of graded attempts this semester which had a lot of positive initial feedback; however, we realized after launching that our teachers really desired some more in depth explanations of grading to the students.

With that feedback, our design team has started working on creating new reporting modules that really explain how a student is being graded, and what they need to accomplish in each attempt in order to satisfy the grading requirements.

What approach did students take first?

In this springs survey (which was given after completion of the simulation game) we asked the students to describe how they proceeded with their Startup.

Interestingly enough, the majority of students decided that for a SaaS type of company they preferred to focus on building their product first.   Many students also noted (and we’re happy about this result) that they felt it was important to balance the creation of the product (i.e., and MVP) with the marketing initiatives.  

We definitely considered this a WIN in terms of learning outcome, so job well done!

What’s next?

So after all these updates, you might be wondering what’s next on the horizon!

After talking with the students, entrepreneurship faculty, and our design team we’ve determined the following priorities for our roadmap:

1. Add additional explanations of the mechanics of profit, expenses, marketing, and company stats in the gameplay (most requested feature)
2. Add the ability for students to utilize real-life marketing techniques, such as Pay Per Click advertising
3. Add the ability for students to see their results compared with other students.
4. Increase the clarity of Products and the primary offering of each company.

So, in terms of an update for our community there you go!  That’s how the semester went and those are the high level findings.

If you have any questions, as always please don’t hesitate to reach out!  Otherwise, we look forward to speaking with you next month!

Jedi & The Startup Wars team