Our goal is to develop skills, instead of fleeting lexical knowledge, to prepare students for nowadays unpredictable and ever changing world. To reach this goal we successfully applied for ERASMUS+ EU grant. In this post we introduce more detailed the 2 key points of this project:
– organize a business simulation competition for high school students from Central-Europe
– develop a freeware business simulation game for high school students

Landing page of the project: teachplus.eu

The aims of the project TEACH

The TEACH (Transnational Education And Competition in High schools) project was summoned due to the deficiencies of the standard educational system. The standard methods favor the teaching of the rapidly aging lexical knowledge. With respect to this problem, the aim of the project is to develop both soft and hard skills, thus the players are becoming capable of handling the diverse and unpredictable changes in their careers.

Background of the project

The most dominant company type in the EU is the SME with 99% share, which gives the 2/3 of jobs in private sector. The SMEs are the giants of economy, since they employ the 80% of newly hired employees. However youth doesn’t tend to start new businesses. The TEACH project is willing to contribute to the EU2020 strategic goals, to improve the job-seeking ability, entrepreneurial attitude, transversal and digital abilities of the youth.
The fulfilment of the targets is ensured by the collaboration of our company and of high schools from Hungary, Romania and a Slovakia.
The members of the coordinator have been developing simulation games for several years, thus providing expertise for future coworking.

About the intellectual property of project TEACH, the business simulation game

Throughout the course of the TEACH project, a business simulation game is developed with an online interface, free of charge. The business simulation games convert the often tedious curriculum into an interesting, easy to understand experience, since the knowledge is learned through intense acting. During the simulation the students have to form teams, manage companies and compete each other: strategic, financial, human resources, marketing, inventory management and commercial decisions have to be made, while the adaptation to the changing market environment is a must.
An advantage of the simulation is, that the player does not take real financial risks, compared to being a head of a real company. The simulation improves the transversal skills, including process oriented mindset, teamwork, management skills, complex vision and time management.
The simulation can be easily integrated into the everyday education. Due to the components building on playfulness learning
becomes fun.

Execution of the project

The business simulation software and the competition is the shared output of the consortia. All the partners are taking part in theprogress:
1) The simulations are to be translated to the mother-tongue of the participating institutions, furthermore they will be translated to English. This supports the dissemination of the products Europe wide.
2) Decreasing the number of decision inputs, since the current software made for universitites is too complex for high school students.
3) Web page development.
4) Software model improvements.
As a result of the TEACH project, until the consortium develops a business simulation game, furthermore the consortium hosts the event of the Central-European Business Simulation Competition for high school students.
During the TEACH project the partnership is eager to execute a learning procedure based on ICT (information and communication based technologies).

Chronological overview of the project

Expected results and effects

The simulations remain free of charge for high schools even after the accomplishment of the TEACH project.
As a result of the TEACH project, students will be more skilled upon graduating from high school. TEACH is beneficial for both companies and employees, in case of starting a company, it prevents some imminent failures on entrepreneurial side.
Multiple PhD publications shall be created based on analyzing the big data collected during simulations. The publications will contribute to both the international awareness of the field and the embedding into the scientific life.
We set a target of reaching at least 400 students during the project. We plan on expanding the simulations outside the consortium to reach at least 9 more teachers and educational institutions.
We believe that the project serves as a proper base for a EU-wide spread of the intellectual property and the good practices developed in the project.

We are committed to a humanistic vision of quality education worldwide, the realization of everyone’s right to education, and the belief that education plays a fundamental role in human, social and economic development.

To register as a teacher in the project see the landing page of the TEACH project at teachplus.eu