About us
About Hatchable
Hatchable teaches kids 12+ how to build real businesses. The curriculum was led by Dr. Raphael Camargo Penteado, and it pairs a proper grounding in how business works with the hands-on job of actually running one.
Our Mission
A twelve-year-old who has run something small and real understands work differently afterwards. That is what Hatchable is for: not a unit on business, but the experience of having had one, at an age when the stakes are low enough to get it wrong.
What the course is
9 modules, 217 lessons. Modules 1 to 8 are open at /learn — 167 lessons, with the videos, transcripts and worked examples, and no account needed to read them. Quizzes and hand-ins are the parts that need one, because they save what you did.
A lesson is a video, a set of slides, a reading, a worked example, a quiz, or something you hand in. Module 9 is on personal finance and is written as slides rather than film. Finish the whole thing and there is a certificate at the end with your name on it.
The course starts with noticing a problem worth solving and ends with presenting the business to other people. Between those, students work through customers, a plan, partnerships, operations, and what happens next.
What a student actually does
Students do not only study a business. They model the idea on a canvas, write a pitch and share it on a link, list what they are selling with photos, take orders, record who has pledged support, track what came in and what went out, and publish a report on how it actually went.
Money never moves through Hatchable. Orders are reservations, paid in person at pickup — no card is entered and no funds are held. Pledges are recorded, not processed. That is the reason a fourteen-year-old can run one of these at all.
Aisha, Jacob and Jenny
Aisha, Jacob and Jenny work through the assignment briefs in 8 of the 9 modules. Aisha is 14, Somali-Canadian, from Ottawa. Jacob is 15, Korean-Canadian, from Toronto. Jenny is 16, loves art, and lives in a small town.
A student sees three different people make three different decisions on the same brief. None of the three is the right answer, which is the point of having three. Module 9, on personal finance, is the exception: each of its two assignments comes with a single worked model answer instead.
If you teach
A teacher sees progress lesson by lesson for every student, reads what each one handed in and writes back to them, and has a pedagogical guide for each of the 9 modules. Students join one of two ways: an invite emailed to them, which lands them on the roster right away, or one link shared with the whole class, which waits for the teacher to approve each student who uses it.
A showcase entry is the part a teacher holds: it stays invisible until they approve it. A pitch or a shop is the student’s own to publish, and when they do it is reachable only through an unguessable link they send to someone — never listed on this site, and marked so search engines skip it. Public pages show first names only. Anything that is up can be taken down again.
Four things you can check for yourself
Open to read
Modules 1 to 8 are at /learn. 167 lessons, with the videos, transcripts and worked examples, and no account needed to read them.
A real venture
Students plan a business, pitch it, list what they are selling, take orders and report on how it went.
No money changes hands here
Orders are reservations paid in person. Pledges are recorded, not processed. No card is entered.
Built for a class
A teacher follows progress lesson by lesson, replies to what students hand in, and has a guide for every module.
The team
Initial research and curriculum development were funded by the founder (Benny Marianayagam) and by Mitacs. The Mitacs funding concluded in 2025. The founder funds Hatchable now.
How the course was built
The course was written by educators and led by Dr. Raphael Camargo Penteado. It was designed so that students do not only read about business, but plan one, pitch it, and run it for real. Every decision behind it is written down.