Learn the Basics of Business and Entrepreneurship
Program description
The BizWorld program teaches the basics of entrepreneurship, business and finance by showing children how the entrepreneurial cycle operates in the friendship bracelet industry. Students are divided into companies, with each student taking on a leadership role to support the team in designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling their products in the BizWorld marketplace.
Students can experience the entire entrepreneurial cycle in just ten hours as they create a revenue stream, deduct expenses, experience a profit or loss, create an income statement and value their company.
The impact the program has on children is vast — from inspiration to creating their own companies, to understanding the relevance of being successful in life and academics.
Duration: thirteen 45-minute sessions
Benefits to teachers/students:
- Reinforces academic standards in a real-world context
- Fun and engaging
- Application of 21st Century skills: team work, critical thinking, creativity
- Project-based and interdisciplinary
- Built-in student assessment
- Affordable and reusable
- Meaningful platform for parent/community engagement
Setting: The BizWorld program has been successfully implemented in a variety of educational settings, including:
- 3-8th grade classroom
- math
- gifted
- social studies
- economics
- special education
- English language learners
- after school
- summer school
How it works: Students are divided into teams of 5 or 6 to start their own friendship bracelet company. Each company works together to:
- Apply for jobs (President and Vice Presidents of the company)
- Incorporate with the state
- Design bracelets based on marketing strategy
- Pitch venture capitalists and sell stock for seed funding
- Manufacture bracelets to sell to a younger grade
- Learn marketing strategy by creating a slogan, poster and commercial
- Sell their product (bracelets) thereby creating revenue
- Keep track of finances (cash in, cash out)
We use the Biz World curriculum to teach
entrepreneurism. Students work as a team
to start and run a community business.
In the Biz World lesson the students
rum a bracelet factory but we changed
the product to ethnic dolls, t-shirts , and buttons.
we plan this summer to transform a vacant lot
into a community garden and weekend cafe.