Board game teaching entrepreneurial mindset to first year students.

This project describes a board game that was developed to teach first-year engineering students about concepts associated with an entrepreneurial mindset. It was implemented at Rowan University in a class of 36 students. Students play in groups of 4-5 students with the goal of moving their game piece to the center of the game board by going through 4 stages of an entrepreneur’s journey — “brainstorming stage,” “prototype stage,” “market stage,” and “sales stage.” As they move their game piece through each stage, the teams are asked questions about engineering curriculum knowledge, resources on campus, and legal/ethical issues. They are also presented with risk/reward cards where they have to decide how many of their existing points they would like to wager on an entrepreneurial related scenario.

In the implementation of the board game at Rowan, students played the game for about 30-40 minutes of class time followed by a group discussion using a Recall, Summarize, Question, Comment, Critique worksheet (RSQCC). This worksheet allows students to dive a bit further into their experience and really connect back between the game and the material being covered in class as part of entrepreneurial mindset instruction. This board game helps students be less intimidated with business related concepts that they might otherwise avoid as part of their engineering degree program. Any faculty member that is looking for a different and novel approach for introducing concepts associated with an entrepreneurial mindset can use this board game.

- Students will be exposed to making decisions without necessarily having all the information to make an informed decision
- Students will apply general ideation techniques to create a list of potential solutions to a provided engineering prompt and then be able to work as a team to select their best potential solution
- Students will be able to describe entrepreneurial resources that exist on campus

- It is important that faculty use some form of debrief after the game, either through the RSQCC worksheet mentioned above or through a group discussion.
- Instructors will also need to be aware that the curriculum and resource cards are particular to the university context and will need to be modified prior to implementation.