As you may recall, I promised to write a series of blogs about entrepreneurship.  As an entrepreneur, I am remarkably biased about entrepreneurship, but I do think that the creativity, innovation and hard work that it requires can be a big part of Durham’s economic development and resurgence.  As entrepreneurs develop plans to engage in the community through volunteerism programs for their companies and employees (see bandwidthcares.org for an example), I think that entrepreneurship will bring much more to Durham than just the creation of wealth and jobs (though those are good goals as well, of course….particularly when that new found wealth is reinvested back in the community).

I firmly believe that the seeds for entrepreneurship can be sown very early in life.  LemonadeDay (please see the blog on this from last week) hits on this concept, and so do video games.  Video Games?  Yes, video games.  The folks from the Acton Foundation for Entrepreneurship have created a series of compelling video games to engage youth in learning the basics of entrepreneurship.  http://www.actonsims.com/

If your kids are like my kids, video games are a huge draw.  Kimberley and I don’t have video games at the house but do allow our boys (we have 3, ages 3,5,7) to play games on my iphone when we are travelling.  This has worked great for us, as it takes away some of the tedium of long wait in the airport, even if we just limit it to 30 minutes.  The draw, though, of video games is so great that it’s enough to tell them that they can play them later in the trip to keep them well behaved and excited.  I’m not sure if video games had the same control over me while growing up, but the games (pong, then space invaders and pacman) weren’t nearly as good as the ones that are out now.  Ok, so far I’m not telling you anything that you didn’t already know.  So here goes:
You’ll see from the actonsims website that there are several different games to play.

There are single player games like Galactic Zappers that teach kids how to overcome operations bottlenecks, and multiplayer games like Price Point.  One of Acton’s games that has been reviewed by gamesforchange.org that seems to have gotten some traction:
From: http://www.gamesforchange.org/main/gameprof/731

RoboRush! is meant to teach students how to build a business from the ground up.  Students will start a small robot-manufacturing business through grassroots methods: pursuing sales, running efficient operations, and learning to say ‘no’ to less-profitable customer requests.  As the student progresses they will have the opportunity to scale up the business by making sound decisions and taking risks.  In growing the business the student has the opportunity to hire staff, open a storefront, and even open a factory.  As they do, they will find that the game play becomes more challenging as they find that managing staff, monitoring demand, and balancing profitability are not as easy as they may have originally imagined.

Another game associated with helping youth get interested in entrepreneurship is from the NFIB Young Entrepreneur Foundation is Johnny Money: www.NFIB.com/jmog.  This looks to be worth checking out as well.  Undoubtedly there are more online games as well, and I hope that folks add to this list in the comment section.

I still think that the best way to teach kids about entrepreneurship is through LemonadeDay.org, but as that program is designed to run once a year (though there’s nothing holding kids back, of course, from doing it more frequently), these video games may present part of the solution for planting the seeds of entrepreneurship in Durham’s kids from an early age…seeds that will hopefully sprout, grow and flourish to Durham’s benefit for many years to come.

There are no comments for this entry yet.