Provided by Venture Valley
This video game teaches entrepreneurship to college students
Oliver Stoner German receives the prize as the winner of the Venture Valley contest.
Free mobile and PC games teach students what they can't learn in class: how to react to dynamically changing markets in real time.
As BestColleges reports, Venture Valley, created by the Singleton Foundation for Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurship, is a multiplayer game where you compete and collaborate with friends and others online for the best entrepreneurial outcomes. Players This is a business building game.
All players start with a dog walking service, earn money in-game to build their business and assets, and play cards to their advantage or their opponent's disadvantage.
Mobile game organizers have begun holding contests where college students can bet thousands of dollars to see who can generate the most profitable business against their opponents.
Oliver Stoner German is a sophomore at the University of Arizona studying computer science and economics. He was also Venture Valley's first tournament winner.
Stoner German discovered Venture Valley while walking around campus. He saw a flyer for his Venture Valley contest and started playing, eventually winning and taking home $2,500 in prize money. He then flew to Chicago to participate in the University Entrepreneurship Organization's 39th Annual Global Conference and Pitch Competition, where he won $10,000.
Stoner German learned from the fast, dynamic business world of gaming and learned how to pitch real-life ventures at the University of Arizona's Help — Student Help. Shelp is a peer-to-peer marketplace where students can request help with anything you can think of, including tutoring, cleaning your room, moving, and more. Stoner German founded Shelp after realizing there was no place for students to turn to other students for help. He said he saw a ton of Snapchat stories of people asking for help and offering cash in return.
“I thought there had to be a safer and better way,” he told BestColleges. Shelp allows students to scroll through requests on job boards, message posters, and earn money.
“I find that most of the time when I ask my friends for advice and help, they know more than they do in college because they've been there and experienced everything,” Stoner-German said. Told.
Shelp was fully released in February and has about 1,000 downloads. But it didn't start out as a hit. Stoner German had to pivot his marketing strategy when the app soft-launched late last year. This is what he learned from his Venture Valley.
He said the biggest lesson Venture Valley taught him was how to react to the market and quickly pivot strategy. In Venture Valley, each player's in-game business impacts the market and player revenue through changes in employee wages, industry, sales prices, and marketing.
The Shelp team realized that no one was downloading the app because no one knew about it, so they immediately started hosting events, offering rewards programs, and letting people know what the app was and how to use it. started.
Venture Valley supported Stoner-German's first business. And that inspired most of the other participants to start thinking about starting their own businesses.
Venture Valley found in a recent study that nearly 70% of college students became interested in starting a business after playing a game. “These findings continue to validate the power of gamified learning and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Venture Volley game in teaching entrepreneurship and financial literacy,” Sherry Miles, CEO of the Singleton Foundation, said in a press release. This further supports this.” “Venture Valley games will continue to empower this generation of students to navigate the complexities of the business world with confidence and strategic skills.”
The study also found that more than 80% of college students believe the game is an effective way to teach business and entrepreneurship. And not only students are aware of this, but professors are also aware of this.
Tony Garcia, professor of finance at Seton Hall University's Stillman School of Business, said, “I was impressed with the game's instructions because it taught students how to learn the basics in a fun and exciting fast-paced structure.'' This is because business concepts can be applied.” he told Best College.
“I think of this game as a learning technique related to the case method because it requires you to apply business concepts to specific business situations.” Garcia encouraged students to participate in Venture Valley's University Cup He said he encouraged them to apply the concepts they learned from the app in class.
“Seeing how these puzzle pieces relate to each other helps students understand business as a whole, rather than a series of unrelated pieces,” Garcia said. Told.
According to Stoner German, there's more to being a successful entrepreneur than what you learn in classes and video games. “You have to be a marketer, a programmer, a finance person. It's really fun and fulfilling,” he told his Best Colleges.
“If you love the problem you're solving, you love your product, you're really passionate about it, my biggest advice is if you're going to pursue entrepreneurship. , you have to actually love the problem you're solving, and you have to actually love the product. ”
this story produced by best college Reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
