Teaching entrepreneuship using serious games in a Web 2.0 environment

This paper reports on the main piloting of the StartUp_EU (http://www.startup.odl.org/) Lifelong Learning European Project. StartUp_EU aimed at simulating the excitement and creative innovation of starting up new company. The project developed a series of serious mini-games, an encompassing Web2.0 platform based on ILIAS Learning Content Management System (LCMS) and a collaborative competition for secondary school students, between 14 and 18 years of age, to inspire high tech entrepreneurship. 243 students participated in a competition completing a series of 8 tasks simulating the process of arriving at an idea for a business to a real product and creating an elevator pitch. Pre-competition and post-competition questionnaires were collected. The remainder of the paper presents the results of the pre-and post- questionnaires regarding participants' perception of the learning experience regarding entrepreneurship using serious games and Web 2.0.