What happens when a middle school teacher runs an entrepreneurship game in 10 minutes?

Q: What happens when a middle school teacher runs an entrepreneurship game in 10 minutes?

A 10-minute classroom entrepreneurship game can reach hundreds of students in a single day. We saw this firsthand in a one-time Vigo County activation that touched roughly 400 students through brief, repeating rounds.

The story

Most middle school class periods are 45 to 50 minutes. That sounds long until you account for transitions, attendance, announcements, and the energy crash after lunch. A teacher experimenting with entrepreneurship rarely has more than a 10-minute window to inject something new without breaking the day's lesson plan. In one-time Vigo County activations, we ran a compressed version of the SideHustle Labs format inside that exact window. Around 400 students cycled through the experience across the day. The mechanic was simple: a prompt, a quick team huddle, and a 60-second pitch. No slides, no homework, no rubric the teacher had to grade later. The win was that students got a real taste of generating an idea on the clock and standing behind it without two weeks of buildup.

What it means

You don't need a semester-long elective to introduce founder thinking. The constraint of 10 minutes forces clarity, removes excuses, and gives every kid in the room a chance to play. Repeatable formats matter more than long curricula when the goal is exposure at scale. A teacher who can run something in 10 minutes can run it 6 times a day, 5 days a week.

Try it

• Play free at playsidehustle.com
• See us live: Sept 25 at Pershing Hall in Austin. luma.com/playsidehustle
• Email team@playsidehustle.com