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Entrepreneurship in the Classroom

Global research has identified entrepreneurship as one of the most powerful contextual learning frameworks for developing innovation capacity; a growth mindset; creativity and critical thinking; financial and digital literacy; and other critical skills the next generation will need to become adaptable, employable and competitive adults.

Entrepreneurship education benefits students from all socio- economic backgrounds because it teaches kids to think outside the box and nurtures unconventional talents and skills. Furthermore, it creates opportunity, ensures social justice, instils confidence and stimulates the economy. (Ref: Why Schools should teach Entrepreneurship – https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245038)

 “There is an urgent need to shift mindsets in our approach to jobs, careers and work. New big data analysis provides us with insights into the patterns of skills young people now require navigating complex and uncertain working lives. We must act now to ensure young Australians can thrive in the new world of work.” –Foundation for Young Australians THE NEW WORK MINDSET Report 2016

In NEW WORK MINDSET (www.fya.org.au/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/The-New-Work-Mindset.pdf), FYA reported their research has showed the urgent need for investment in a national enterprise skills and careers education strategy that would:

  • Begin early in primary school and build consistently, year on year, throughout high school
  • Be provided in ways that young people want to learn, including through experience, immersion and with peers
  • Provide accurate information about and exposure to where future jobs will exist and the skills to craft and navigate multiple careers
  • Engage students, schools, industry and parents in co- designing opportunities in and outside the classroom

Entrepreneurship is an engaging and relevant way to augment formal curriculum and / or add new, future workforce focused skills and general capabilites:

  • Increased attendance
  • Higher academic achievement
  • Fewer discipline referrals
  • Soft Skill development
    • Increased sense of “locus of control”
    • Increased self-esteem and respect
    • Encourage risk-taking & learning from failure (Flearning)
    • Use opportunity recognition/ problem solving skills
    • Embrace diversity/ socialization skills
    • Explore ethics issues
    • Foster and value idea generation
  • Technical Skills Development
    • Improved financial literacy
    • Understand entrepreneurship process/ business plan
  • Awareness of career and entrepreneurial options
    • Consider steps in business start up
    • Increased number of students identifying entrepreneurship as a career choice
    • Define entrepreneurs’ contribution to society
    • Develop workplace literacy
    • Heightened awareness of the role of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial thinkers and leaders across industry, business and society
    • Recognize the contributions of entrepreneurs and learn how they give back
  • Become an educated, empowered consumer
  • Demonstrate conflict resolution/ negotiation/ sales- marketing/ persuasion skills

The world is changing radically, moving extremely fast and becoming more complex. Students are facing a future workforce that will look very different to today and it will require a batch of new skills that may not be easily or traditionally taught in schools.

Entrepreneurship is a great way to augment formal curriculum in a real-world context and enable students to building some of the future work skills below (Source – Future Work Skills 2020 ):

  • Sense-Making – Ability to determine the deeper significance of what is being expressed.
  • Social Intelligence – Ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.
  • Novel and Adaptive Thinking – Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.
  • Cross-Cultural Competency – Ability to operate in different cultural settings.
  • Computational Thinking – Ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and understand data based reasoning.
  • New Media Literacy – Ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms and to leverage these media for persuasive communication.
  • Transdiciplinary – Literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
  • Design Mindset – Ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
  • Cognitive Load Management – Ability to discriminate and filtre information for importance, and to understand how to maximise cognitive functions.

Our programs are designed to give young people skills and experiences that augment their school studies and give them new skills that aren’t easily acquired through the current curriculum.

We believe in the power of entrepreneurship to help all young people become more adaptable, employable and competitive adults with comprehensive life-skills. We aren’t just trying to produce more entrepreneurs, we want all young people to have the experience of entrepreneurship from an early age so that it can help shape an agile mindset and give them 21st century skills they will need in the future regardless of their path.

We’ve got strong evidence over the 10 years we’ve been running our programs that ALL learners can excel at entrepreneurship regardless of their background or even if they aren’t gifted in the traditional ‘three As’ – academic, artistic and athletic.

We’ve seen a lot of young people who were depressed or distracted, had low-self esteem and no confidence or dyslexia and other learning difficulties, all have a transformation through the programs, graduating with confidence and a new belief in themselves.

We’ve co-created our programs with educators, curriculum experts and enterprise leaders to be as easy as possible for you to implement in the classroom.

Whilst our programs rely on a start-up business process to provide the framework for learning key concepts and building skills, entrepreneurship is more than just ‘business’ and includes a strong emphasis on problem-solving, creative and critical thinking, design thinking, financial literacy, persuasive communications and critical soft skills.

Our goal is to give educators the expanded knowledge, skills and increase their confidence as they deliver our programs so we’ve structured the programs and designed comprehensive teaching resources for with consideration for those with little to no business knowledge including:

  • Implementation guides
  • Curriculum mapping
  • Program plan and workflows
  • Curriculum-aligned lesson plans
  • Instructional videos

Futurepreneurs Education

Futurepreneurs Education offers two curriculum-aligned online entrepreneurship programs for years 7 – 12, combining online student briefings, challenges and assessments with comprehensive teaching resources designed for classroom delivery.

The program is delivered in 10 (Futurepreneurs Start-Up Incubator) – 15 (Futurepreneurs Start-Up Accelerator) levels offering blended learning developed through collaboration between entrepreneurs and educators. It’s designed to be a flexible, low-touch, cross-curriculum education resource that integrates easily into classroom programming, augmenting formal education to develop an agile growth mindset and critical skills for the future workforce built through entrepreneurship.

  • Futurepreneurs | Start-Up Incubator is ideal for years 9 -10 and is also suitable for years 7 – 8 with prior exposure to entrepreneurship. It covers 10 Levels and more than 35 challenge assignments introducing students to the exciting world of entrepreneurship, activating their entrepreneurial DNA and developing their creative problem solving, design thinking and pitching skills. Along the way they collaborate with other Futurepreneurs in their class group, collect feedback on their ideas and build confidence and resilience as they ultimately pitch their business ideas and product prototypes to a (mock) investor audience.
  • Futurepreneurs | Start-Up Accelerator is ideal for years 9 – 12 or for students with prior experience with entrepreneurship. It covers 15 Levels and more than 50 challenge assignments introducing students to the exciting world of entrepreneurship, activating their entrepreneurial DNA and developing their creative problem solving, design thinking, commercialisation and pitching skills. Along the way they collaborate with other Futurepreneurs in their class, collect feedback on their ideas and build confidence and resilience as they ultimately pitch their business ideas and product prototypes to a (mock) investor audience.

(Note: To maintain privacy and security, students are enrolled in locked school cohorts and are only able to share and interact with students enrolled in their cohort.)

The program is delivered securely online at OpenLearning.com

Your program registration fee covers 1 year access to the Futurepreneurs Academy online including:

  • Student account login giving unlimited access to all Levels including briefings, challenge assignments and assessments
  • Social learning – Student dashboard also gives them access to messaging, portfolio sharing and private group chat feature to talk to any one else within their Class cohort only.
  • Facilitator login and Classroom Implementation Guide – Educators have the option to facilitate learning and track students’ progress and impact via their secure Facilitator dashboard.
  • Secure online school set-up
  • FREE 30-minute onboarding and implementation webinar for schools.
  • Ongoing support from Entropolis HQ education specialists

The program leads learners through the process of building their own start-up business across 10 (Start-Up Incubator) – 15 (Start-Up Accelerator) Levels.

Start-Up Incubator

Learn the fundamentals of thinking, acting and creating like an entrepreneur and building a real-world, viable and sustainable business. Solve a real-world problem creatively, develop an innovative product prototype and a business model blueprint to help pitch for start-up capital to launch your start-up.

  • Level 1 | Entrepreneurship Bootcamp
  • Level 2 | Problem Solving + Ideation
  • Level 3 | Target Customers
  • Level 4 | Design Thinking I – Process Overview + Empathise Stage
  • Level 5 | Design Thinking II –  Ideate Stage + Product Design
  • Level 6 | Design Thinking III – Prototype + Test + Pivot
  • Level 7 | Business Model Blueprint I – Value Proposition + Delivery Proposition
  • Level 8 | Business Model Blueprint II – Financial Proposition, Vision + Mission
  • Level 9 | Start-Up Budget
  • Level X1 | Pitching for Start-Up Capital

Start-Up Accelerator

A more advanced version of the Start-Up Incubator program that extends you into the launch phase of your start-up. You’ll learn more about commercialisation, customer acquisition, growth and scale on your way to becoming a bona fide entrepreneur with your own viable operating business.

  • Level 1 | Entrepreneurship Bootcamp
  • Level 2 | Problem Solving + Ideation
  • Level 3 | Target Customers
  • Level 4 | Design Thinking I – Process Overview + Empathise Stage
  • Level 5 | Design Thinking II –  Ideate Stage + Product Design
  • Level 6 | Design Thinking III – Prototype + Test + Pivot
  • Level 7 | Business Model Blueprint I – Value Proposition + Delivery Proposition
  • Level 8 | Business Model Blueprint II – Financial Proposition, Vision + Mission
  • Level 9 | Start-Up Budget
  • Level X1 | Pitching for Start-Up Capital
  • Level 10 | Naming + Brand Identity
  • Level 11 | Website + Landing Pages
  • Level 12 | Customer Acquisition I – Marketing
  • Level 13 | Customer Acquisition II – Sales
  • Level X2 – Scale-Up Pitch for Growth Capital

Entrepreneurship is not linear and can be pretty relentless in the real-world however, we’ve tried to streamline the process you’ll follow in the program so that classroom time invested is minimised and students can move through the levels at a reasonable speed.

We’ve designed the program so that concepts are delivered in short briefings and mini-challenges to keep momentum building. There are 15 levels and each level is divided into 4 sub-levels that ‘chunk’ down the information and make it easier to apply to building your start-up.

We recommend the program is run over 2 terms to ensure that all the content is covered, challenges can be completed and learnings embedded. We recommend 1 hour – 90 minutes in the classroom each week to:

  • Re-cap the previous level/s
  • Brief in the new level concepts
  • Complete suggested interactive and collaborative activities
  • Set homework tasks

Students can spend as much or as little time as they need to complete the challenges but as a guide, each level (4 sub-levels) should take 2 – 4 hours of work per week. Note: Some levels may be too much to complete in one week so we recommend splitting these across two weeks.

Programs are booked and paid for online at www.theentropolis.com. You can select Pay by Card or Pay By Invoice.

  1. As soon as we’ve received your payment and verified your email address we’ll set up your school cohort online in a secure ‘group’.
  2. Nominated teachers delivering the program will be added as program facilitators and will receive emails to the nominated email address to complete their online registration and account set up on Open Learning.
  3. Teachers are then able to upload their students’ email addresses for them to join their own class cohort. We provide guidance for this set up or we can upload / set up on your behalf.
  4. Students will be sent their own Invitation to Join and Welcome emails etc. and asked to modify their account settings.

Notes:

  • By joining their class cohort they can only interact with students participating in the program in their own school.
  • All account settings can be manually set to ensure appropriate level of work visibility and sharing etc.
  • We recommend Parents / Guardians / Responsible adults are notified and give their permission to set up their child’s account online.

Our programs are designed to give young people skills and experiences that augment their school studies and give them new skills that aren’t easily acquired through the current curriculum. Also entrepreneurship is a great way to inspire and engage students by providing meaningful real-world context to their studies.

We believe in the power of entrepreneurship to help all young people become more adaptable, employable and competitive adults with comprehensive life-skills. We aren’t just trying to produce more entrepreneurs, we want all young people to have the experience of entrepreneurship from an early age so that it can help shape an agile mindset and give them 21st century skills they will need in the future regardless of their path.

We’ve got strong evidence over the 10 years we’ve been running our programs that ALL learners can excel at entrepreneurship regardless of their background or even if they aren’t gifted in the traditional ‘three As’ – academic, artistic and athletic.

We’ve seen a lot of young people who were depressed or distracted, had low-self esteem and no confidence or dyslexia and other learning difficulties, all have a transformation through the programs, graduating with confidence and a new belief in themselves.

Futurepreneurs Education is co-designed by entrepreneurs, educators and enterprise leaders to make sure students time with us is engaging while adding the most educational value. Our goal is to train students to be entrepreneurial thinkers and creators, empowering them with the critical mindset and skillset they need to be adaptable, employable and competitive in the future, whether they decide to build and run their own business or pursue a different life / career path.

By completing the full program they will:

  • Be able to think, act and create like entrepreneurs
  • Increase your innovation capacity and ability to solve problems affecting the world
  • Develop an agile growth mindset
  • Become a competent creative and critical thinker
  • Design products and services that solve real-world problem and your customers will love
  • Understand revenue, profit and loss and build other core financial skills
  • Improve your digital literacy
  • Commercialise your products and attract customers through marketing and sales
  • Develop and deliver pitch presentations to help you launch and grow your start-up
  • Enhance your collaboration, decision-making and leadership skills
  • Build your confidence, resilience and risk tolerance

Kidpreneur Ninjas Education

**NEW in 2021** Kidpreneur Ninjas Education is an entrepreneurship program for upper primary students designed for classroom delivery with integrated online modules. The program is based on our Kidpreneur Challenge, Australia’s leading entrepreneurhip program for primary schools, co-designed by educators and entrepreneurs and delivered to more than 28,000 Australian students since 2016.

Kidpreneur Ninjas takes students on an amazing and immersive start-up journey – from problem solving and business ideation, through design thinking, business modelling and pitching.  Along the way students earn points and badges for applying their learning to building an awesome business in the real-world culminating with a pitch or other showcase event.

The curriculum-aligned program is ideal for students in years 5 and 6 or those who have had prior exposure to entrepreneurship, STEAM or other enterprise / business studies and we’ve designed the program to augment formal studies across key learning areas and general capabilities including:

  • English
  • Mathematics
  • Design and Technologies
  • Humanities and Social Sciences
  • The Arts – Creative Arts
  • Literacy
  • Numeracy
  • Information and Communication Technology Capability
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Ethical Understanding

The program is delivered securely online at OpenLearning.com

Your Package includes:

  • Educator facilitation guide including instructional videos and curriculum-aligned lesson plans for 16 program modules
  • Kidpreneur Ninjas Academy online subscription for up to 100 students including briefings, mission assignments and fun quizzes for them to complete
  • Curated entrepreneurship learning resources
  • 1-year access to WhatsApp group and other online collaboration tools to support successful program implementation and impact
  • 1-year customer support from Entropolis HQ education specialists

Note: Social learning, information sharing, messaging and collaboration tools have been switched off to ensure online privacy and security for U13s. 

The program leads learners through the process of building their own start-up business across 12 Levels. The levels breakdown as follows:

  • Level 1 | The World Of Entrepreneurs
  • Level 2 | Target Customers
  • Level 3 | Design Thinking I
  • Level 4 | Design Thinking II
  • Level 5 | Business Set-Up
  • Level 6 | Business Model Blueprint
  • Level 7 | Financials – Profit + Loss
  • Level X1 | Pitch for Start-Up Capital
  • Level 8 | Naming + Brand Identity
  • Level 9 | Production + Operations
  • Level 10 | Sales + Marketing
  • Level X2 | Sales Pitch Video
  • Level 11 | Business Launch
  • Level 12 | Growing Your Business
  • Level X3 | Investor Pitch Video

Entrepreneurship is not linear and can be pretty relentless in the real-world however, we’ve streamlines the process students follow in the program so that classroom time invested is minimised and students can work through the levels at a reasonable pace themselves.

We’ve designed the program so that concepts are delivered in short briefings and mini-challenges to keep momentum building. There are 12 levels (+ three extension levels) and each level is divided into 4 sub-levels that ‘chunk’ down the information and make it easier to apply to building your start-up.

Depending on their stage and level of passion, kidpreneurs can spend as much or as little time as they need to complete the challenges but as a guide, each level (4 sub-levels) should take 3 – 4 hours of work.

Note: There is no time-limit on completing the program.

Access to the program is immediate as soon as we’ve received your payment and verified your email address. Parents / Guardians / Responsible adults will receive emails to their nominated email address to complete the online registration and account set up on Open Learning.

Our programs are designed to give young people skills and experiences that augment their school studies and give them new skills that aren’t easily acquired through the current curriculum. This program is not just about ‘business’ and enterprise skills. It has a strong focus on building on kids imagination and extending it into problem solving, creative and criticial thinking, design thinking and persuasive communications.

We believe in the power of entrepreneurship to help all young people become more adaptable, employable and competitive adults with comprehensive life-skills. We aren’t just trying to produce more entrepreneurs, we want all young people to have the experience of entrepreneurship from an early age so that it can help shape an agile mindset and give them 21st century skills they will need in the future regardless of their path.

We’ve got strong evidence over the 10 years we’ve been running our programs that ALL learners can excel at entrepreneurship regardless of their background or even if they aren’t gifted in the traditional ‘three As’ – academic, artistic and athletic.

We’ve seen a lot of young people who were depressed or distracted, had low-self esteem and no confidence or dyslexia and other learning difficulties, all have a transformation through the programs, graduating with confidence and a new belief in themselves.

Kidpreneur Ninjas Education is co-designed by entrepreneurs, educators and enterprise leaders to make sure your students time with us is engaging while adding the most educational value.

This program is not just about ‘business’ and enterprise skills. It has a strong focus on building on kids imagination and extending it into problem solving, creative and criticial thinking, design thinking and persuasive communications. Our goal is to train kids to be entrepreneurial thinkers and creators, empowering them with the critical mindset and skillset they need to be adaptable, employable and competitive in the future, whether they ultiamtely decide to build and run their own business or not.

Program Outcomes

By completing the full program students will:

  • Be able to think, act and create like entrepreneurs
  • Increase their innovation capacity and ability to solve problems affecting the world
  • Develop an agile growth mindset
  • Become a competent creative and critical thinker
  • Design products and services that solve real-world problems and customers will love
  • Understand revenue, profit and loss
  • Improve digital literacy
  • Commercialise products and attract customers through marketing and sales
  • Develop and deliver pitch presentations to help launch and grow their start-up
  • Enhance collaboration, decision-making and leadership skills
  • Build confidence, resilience and risk tolerance

Student Benefits

  • Increased attendance
  • Higher academic achievement
  • Fewer discipline referrals
  • Soft Skill development
    • Increased sense of “locus of control”
    • Increased self-esteem and respect
    • Encourage risk-taking & learning from failure (Flearning)
    • Use opportunity recognition/ problem solving skills
    • Embrace diversity/ socialization skills
    • Explore ethics issues
    • Foster and value idea generation
  • Technical Skills Development
    • Improved financial literacy
    • Understand entrepreneurship process/ business plan
  • Awareness of career and entrepreneurial options
    • Consider steps in business start up
    • Increased number of students identifying entrepreneurship as a career choice
    • Define entrepreneurs’ contribution to society
    • Develop workplace literacy
    • Heightened awareness of the role of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial thinkers and leaders across industry, business and society
    • Recognize the contributions of entrepreneurs and learn how they give back
  • Become an educated, empowered consumer
  • Demonstrate conflict resolution/ negotiation/ sales- marketing/ persuasion skills

In our experience, young kids have strong imagination, innate problem-solving skills and creativity and our goal in the program is to amplify and build on these natural talents by applying them in the real-work context of building a start-up.

Even if kids have a slow start, they rarely don’t produce a great product solution and viable business. Even if their business doesn’t turn out to be a raging success and / or kids decide that owning their own business is not for them, by training their entrepreneurial mind and skillset through the start-up process, kids will still be learning new practical skills and having fun!

Through learning about entrepreneurship, students develop the life skills of creativity, confidence, resilience, independence and adaptability. These are skills needed for every child to thrive in today’s rapidly changing world and be equipped for careers that don’t exist yet. And as this program has a strong social enterprise focus, we’re teaching kids to use the power of business for good at this early age so they grow up to be global citizens.

Entrepreneurship allows kids to identify problems and gaps in the world they are interested in or passionate about, use their imagination to come up with a new product solution and turn it into a real business. It opens their eyes and minds to opportunities and shows them that they can self-determine their future.

Online privacy and child security is of paramount importance to us. We use a secure 3rd Party online platform (www.openlearning.com) to host and deliver our programs and we / they only collect the information from our kidpreneurs that is absolutely necessary to ensure an enjoyable and productive experience online.

We endeavor at all times to remind kidpreneurs of what is safe, appropriate online behavior and to minimise risk we have blocked access to the social learning tools within our program including messaging, information sharing, posting in class forums etc. However, as with any online activities undertaken by kids, we encourage and at times require parental involvement.

You can read more about our privacy, child security and conditions of use policies by clicking on the links below:

We recommend parents and guardians give written permission for enrolling their children in our program and are aware of all online activities undertaken by them through the course of the program.

Educators will receive notifications and other emails from time to time including advising new information and updates regarding our programs and alerting them to any issues or concerns regarding their students online activity.

The program challenges and other activities are designed to be self-guided for 10 – 13 years olds based on the classroom briefings however, students may also need parental support and input along the way as they learn new and sometimes complex concepts and get their business venture up and running.

That is up to each school. Some schools charge the cost of the program back to parents. Aside from the cost of the program, there is little or no additional cost to the school. Funding for the students businesses in the program should be raised by the students themselves. The only other costs would be some materials normally found in the arts / crafts department!

We recommend that students work in groups of 3 or 4 to build their start-up business, the optimal number to realise the most benefits of collaborative learning.

A group of 3-4 enables each student to:

  • Learn how the individual strengths of a diversified team can make their business better and more successful.
  • Learn to confidently present their ideas and opinions and deal with rejection, debate and negotiation appropriately.
  • Take on a ‘specialised’ role in the business based on their area of interest and / or strength.

In our experience, groups larger than 3-4 can dilute learning outcomes – activities and resources are split between too many students meaning each does not get a full understanding of the overall business building process. Any less than 3 and students can become demotivated when they work on their own or if their only partner is away.

Holding a Market Day or Pitch Showcase Day is optional but highly recommended to finish off the program.

A key learning outcome of Kidpreneur Ninjas is to provide safe and secure opportunities for students to develop confidence and interpersonal skills including:

  • Presenting business ideas and products for consideration and feedback
  • Confidently pitching their product and business to different audiences
  • Customer service and handling money
  • Self-managing and learning from rejection and failure
  • Applying all feedback, good and bad, to pivoting and improving their business

Market Day vs Showcase Events

The core curriculum is designed for students to build their entrepreneurial skills and apply them in a real-world context at a Market Day. They produce physical products and sell them to customers which helps them put their learning into action while building their communication skills, confidence and resilience.

The Market Day format is recommended for students who are experiencing entrepreneurship for the first time. For extension students or those who have previously participated in entrepreneurship program, an option is to culminate the program with a Showcase event.

This format is similar to a major Art of Science project showcase where the students entrepreneurial work is featured and possibly judged by the school community or invited guests. In this format students would submit their product prototype and do a mock Investor pitch to a live audience. All the elements that would be required for the Showcase are included in the Extension modules.

The value of the Showcase event is that, because students are not constrained by having to produce physical products for sale, they are able to develop business and product ideas to solve more complex real-world problems.

The market or showcase day is most effective when the 12 modules of the curriculum have been completed. This will leave students with a fully developed business, equipped with the sales and customer service skills to sell. In module 10 students create a market day plan to strategise how they will experiment on the day to improve their sales. The market day is the last part of the program followed by a reflection task to ensure the market day learning’s are absorbed. If you know you would like to sell at a particular event in your school or community, you should plan to be finish the Kidpreneur Ninjas program curriculum by this time.