What district-wide entrepreneurship game programming could look like, based on one-time pilot data.
Scaling an entrepreneurship game across a district means designing for repeatability, teacher load, and short class periods. A 10-minute format multiplied across 50 classrooms can reach thousands of students in a week.
The SideHustle Labs format was originally built for 90 minutes with 4 rounds: brainstorm, pitch, score, rotate. Teams of 4 to 5 students compete on Funny + Fundable scoring. That works at the university level when you have a full class period and a faculty sponsor. At the K-12 district level, the constraint changes. You're not designing for one elective. You're designing for hundreds of teachers who already have a packed scope and sequence. A scalable district version has to fit inside an existing block, leave nothing to grade, and give the teacher enough confidence to run it cold. Programs like the STARTEDUp Foundation have shown that district-wide entrepreneurial mindset work is possible when the unit of delivery is small enough for a single teacher to own without extra training.
District scale is a design problem, not a budget problem. The format that wins is the one that survives a substitute teacher, a fire drill, and a Monday morning. When you can run the same compact game in a 6th grade homeroom and a 12th grade economics class with no rewriting, you have something a superintendent can actually deploy.
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