Launching Our New Sites!

We are excited to announce two new releases based on your feedback.


1. We have added features (see below) to upgrade our award-winning Educational Site to give it even more functionality to meet classroom needs.

2. And, we are launching the beta version of a new site, open for users all around the world!

Join an existing course. 
Or, launch your own interactive course and earn money using our simCEO Market Simulator to leverage social learning to advance your entrepreneurial solutions. 

• Develop your idea. Build and share your products and solutions to entrepreneurial problems - pitch decks, sales & marketing plans, start-up budgets … just about anything.
• Test your idea in your market. Don’t go at it alone! Network and get feedback from investors, mentors, and other innovators in your simulated market.
• Ready to launch? See how other innovators solve similar problems, and take feedback to develop. Take the ideas you like and finish our courses with market-tested products you can share with customers, potential partners, and investors.

Our Market Simulator provides a platform for innovative courses, allowing

• aspiring entrepreneurs to share their solutions/ideas, learning from and with one another, as they gain valuable to feedback to improve.
• instructors a dynamic environment to share real-world tasks and news articles - allowing learners to demonstrate  their application of content understanding in an interactive environment to maximize feedback.
• SimCEO Public Courses: Frequently Asked Questions 
• Learn more about becoming a simCEO instructor. 

We've upgraded both sites with additional options for instructors to customize the learning environment, including:

• Instructors can choose to use our pre-created assignments, and now can easily create their own, customized assignments to target skills and content at the desired level of student complexity.
• In addition to the written feedback, instructors can now grade each assignment in our new grade book, 
• Instructors can choose to share our pre-created news articles with students, and now can create their own articles to help target content and add engagement.
• Students can upload PDF documents to share more detailed solutions to business challenges.

How Teachers Customize simCEO

One of the great benefits of simCEO is that it empowers instructors to easily customize the experience, crafting it to meet specific outcomes and/or student needs.

We love the creative ways that instructors shape simCEO to focus on specific subjects. While simCEO already includes links to national standards in Entrepreneurship, Economics, and Personal Finance, it can be customized even further in these areas or other subjects.

We share a few examples below. We encourage instructors to send us ideas so we can share them. The more we share, the more examples we give to new simCEO instructors to give them the spark to see how they can best reach their students.

If we publish your ideas, you will earn a free simulation.

Take a look at our initial list below in the following subjects. More will follow!

  Ideas to integrate STEM/STEAM

  Ideas to integrate Economics 

What Do We Ask Students To Do With Content?

We are striving to get students to move beyond content recall. We know it's not the goal. More specifically, we're striving to re-invent schools and educational experiences so that our units aim for skills and conceptual understandings that will help students be successful in the future.

Unfortunately, most of our learning experiences are still rooted in a traditional model.

We ask students to reproducers of content instead of producers with content.

What types of learning environments allow for this? What would need to change?

In recent years, the increased use of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and authentic assessment techniques such as GRASPS, have helped change this model. But one area where we seem to have missed the mark is in Games-Based Learning (GBL) or gamifying the classroom.  Games-Based Learning and gamification are certainly different. Steven Isaacs (@mr_isaacs) does a good job of describing the difference. But for the sake of this post, they are going to be treated the same.

This is because many (but certainly not all) of these efforts are focused on making learning more engaging - but unfortunately, the learning goal is still largely focused on content recall. Certainly, the GBL world is closer to making a meaningful shift

If our GBL environments continue to focus on the following, we're making progress.

• quests within a recall environment
• decision making within a (academic?) context
• critical thinking and problem solving

To take the next steps, we need more environments where students go beyond choices and decisions based on understanding the content. We need environments where they demonstrate their understanding of the content by producing solutions with that content. They need a context of creation that is authentic. They need to think and act like scientists, historians, and journalists.  We need to create these environments.

That can happen in biology, history, music, art... just about anywhere, including economics and business classes which how we apply this concept with simCEO.

As business and economic simulations go, we can start by sharing the required content and then present a scenario to students and ask them to identify the "correct" choice.

But, more meaningfully, we can put students in an environment like simCEO where we ask them to utilize the required content to create and manage a company within an authentic context. You might understand and recognize supply & demand, tariffs, or marketing techniques in theory, but how will you change your business plan within the simulation because these elements are introduced into your simulation.

And here's where the power of games has great potential: The introduction of that content should produce different responses, solutions, and creations for each student. Introducing a tariff into an environment does not have the same result for every company. Students learn different perspectives and different solutions from one another.

That's the real world. It's contextual. It's applied. 

PBL advocates have known this for a long time and we need our GBL environments to move in this direction.

We need students who can demonstrate content understanding by applying that content successfully within a variety of contexts.   And, we need more learning environments that foster this goal as well.

Learn More: 1:1 Consultation or Join a Teacher Webinar

This was an old blog post. 
We have updated the information here. 

We apologize for the confusion.

Jetlag Learning, makers of simCEO

Measuring The Effects of Entrepreneurship Education: Learn about our 5:5:5 Program

Studies have shown the positive effect that entrepreneurship brings to students in areas such as GPA , inspiration and attitudes for university students.  We are on the lookout to measure these attitudes in K-12 students!

Entrepreneurship empowers students, giving them the problem-solving skills to succeed now and in the future.

Additionally, we believe the innovative learning model of simCEO - where students create their own business, and manage it within a dynamic environment - provides a unique opportunity to engage students in real-world learning.  Instructors integrate the classroom content directly into the simulation, giving students and authentic environment to apply their understanding.

As a tool for entrepreneurship and an innovative tool for innovative, 21st Century learning, both provide fertile ground to study the effects simCEO has on students.

We're seeking school partners for our 5-5-5 Program starting in the 2018-19 school year.

• 5 school districts (a minimum of 250 student-users per year)
• 5 years of free access to simCEO
• 5 years of longitudinal studies of (anonymous) student attitudes via simple survey

Interested school districts can contact info@simceo.org for more information.

Seeking Partners, but here's why to hesitate. Reason #4

In earlier posts, we shared  elements of simCEO that make it a valuable (and much-needed) way for students to learn in the 21st Century.

1) Students who move beyond recall and produce solutions with content.

2) Social Learning: Learning from and with one another.

3) Contextual Learning: Authentic roles & goals

4) Students as creators and dynamic evaluators.

5) Empower instructors to guide meaningful learning experiences.

The list above represents a change to what students experience in schools. But like any change, it does not come easily. These are challenges we have to overcome; we want to be up front with those challenges.

Do we have tested solutions to overcome all of these challenges? No.  But we believe deeply they can be solved, and they need to be solved.

That's why we are looking for partners who can help us overcome these challenges. But we want to attract the right kind of partner. With that in mind, we have come to the last in our 4-Part series we call:

The list of reasons you shouldn’t partner with us.

Reason #4: Can we utilize the cloud to allow instructors to share curated customized resources for the simulation with other instructors?

SimCEO represents an open-ended learning environment. The simulation naturally focuses on entrepreneurial and financial literacy concepts. However, because of its open-ended nature, content from different disciplines and ability levels can be easily integrated into the simulation by the instructor to target student needs.  For example:

• University marketing professors can push in specific marketing concepts or tasks directly into the elements they wish to see in the students’ business plans. Or, they can share news articles to highlight changes in marketing trends to determine how CEOs will alter their business plan (or their investment philosophy) as they adjust to these articles.
• ·7th Grade History teachers may wish to emphasize mission statements and demographics within a unit on the American Revolution set in Boston in 1770. Students can first address these business aspects within their business plan as they learn about the demographics  and historical events in Boston in 1770.  New articles can target specific events (real or fictional) to see how students will adjust their strategy within simCEO.

Within both of these examples and countless others, the open-ended nature allows the simulation to be customized to an instructor’s desired preference. By giving instructors a platform to customize, we want to harness those ideas into a searchable directory for use by other instructors.

A model such as this is also new and only possible when the simulation is open-ended and where content can be implemented by the instructor  in an authentic context. This is similar to what is happening with Minecraft.edu . We believe simCEO has similar potential.

But this is a change from the status quo of a traditional online learning resource. It requires that our future partners see us through the same lens that we see ourselves.

Although simCEO addresses and assesses content, we do not see ourselves as content providers; we see ourselves as context providers, engaging students to apply content in a real-world environment that can be customized by instructors to target specific learning goals.

Within that context, the cloud will be a powerful way to showcase the creative solutions that instructors around the world have.  With the addition of each curated resource, we increase the tools available to future educators.

This is a big and bold goal. It’s a pathway to opening up a far more effective learning tool than we could do in isolation; implementing this effectively requires an expertise we currently do not possess. It’s where we wish to go, and it’s a challenge we hope our future partners will embrace and provide guidance.