Business students build a city

This year’s In the Biz class created a city to experience what it takes to build and run a business.

According to teacher Wendy Stokna, “Each student in the class did baseline research to determine which type of business they would like to create.

“The project-based learning experience required them to select a business type, ownership type, create their building, collaboratively perform city planning, develop a vision board for the business, create a brand, develop a marketing plan including social media marketing, create customer avatars, and make decisions about how they would manage, fund and measure business success.

“The city included businesses such as a grocery store, pharmacy, bakery, game store, coffee shop, office building and apartment building. Having the model truly supported discussions about various aspects of the curriculum to aid student visualization.”

Student reflections of this experience include:

“We learned about entrepreneurship and what goes into running a successful business. Not only that, but it shows how tough being an entrepreneur is and the tasks that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

“Location of your business is very important to growing your business. You could have the best business idea ever, but if you don’t have a good location you are not going to go far in that business.”

“A brand is crucial to getting people to come check out your business. The more intriguing the brand is, the more people may want to come check out your business.”

“Hands-on learning while making our businesses has helped me learn a lot better, in many different ways. For example, being able to pick what business we wanted to ‘run’ made it easier to learn about it because I actually had an interest in said business.”

“The parts that I thought were the hardest were planning the city and marketing. You may think planning a city is pretty easy, but you actually have to figure out which businesses go where and what types of businesses there are. Things can get really tough. Even though planning the city was tough, I also thought that it was fun.”

Mrs. Stokna congratulates her students on this successful endeavor. Great job everyone!