Paper: Efficacy of teaching entrepreneurial mindset using a game-like activity

Abstract

We developed, 'Thank You for Your Service' (TY4YS), a web-browser based, game-like activity as a way to introduce and reinforce the entrepreneurial mindset (EM) for online or on-site courses, in an exploratory way. Even though there are numerous resources available for introducing EM, the TY4YS activity approach is very interactive and most importantly, instead of teaching (or reinforcing) the entrepreneurial concepts first and then engaging in related activities, the students first play, make mistakes, reflect and learn. When the concepts are subsequently presented (or reinforced), they are more relatable and better retained. The activity starts with a military veteran describing veterans' issues. The player's objective is to create an end-product to mitigate some of the challenging issues and showcase that end-product at an upcoming veterans conference. The players (students) will make a series of decisions during the activity leading to an end-product that the customers (veterans) find valuable. After each run of the activity, players are given a score and feedback to reflect, so that during the next run they make better decisions and create a more valuable solution from the veterans' perspective. The decisions students make pertain to various stages of the engineering design process - research, brainstorming, prototyping, and testing. Most importantly, students involve the end-users and incorporate customer feedback (ideally) throughout the process. The activity will take fifteen to thirty minutes from start to finish and may be completed multiple times. EM concepts were introduced in the first week of the first-year 'Introduction to Engineering' course (thirty-six students) and the TY4YS activity was made available two weeks later, as an intervention to reinforce those concepts at an application level, before the start of the final project. The efficacy of using this activity was analyzed by pre and post-activity surveys. In these surveys, the students were asked to self-rate their competency in understanding and applying EM and engineering design process (EDP); they were then given a problem to solve where they can show their EM and EDP understanding on an application level. Results showed that even though students' self-rated level of competency was very high in the pre-activity survey, they displayed poor understanding of EM in solving the provided application problem. In the post-activity survey, the self-rated competency was similarly high, but the displayed understanding significantly improved. In the application problem, students clearly showed the value of involving the customer multiple times in the EDP, in iterative design-and-improve cycles. The further reflection questions in the survey indicated that the students were able to understand EM concepts, make actionable and effective plans to apply EM both in their upcoming courses or side projects, and their future career as engineers.