Our approach
How we designed the course
9 modules and 217 lessons, built around a handful of decisions about how twelve to seventeen year olds actually learn this. Here they are, so you can judge them yourself.
- 01
The same shape, every module
Watch a short video, read what the assignment is asking for, look at three other students' attempts at it, then hand in your own. Once a student has been through that once, they know how the rest of the course works and can spend their attention on the actual thinking rather than on figuring out what is expected.
- 02
Three answers, not one model answer
Aisha, Jacob and Jenny appear in every assignment across modules 1 to 8. They are different people with different ideas, and their answers are genuinely different from each other. A single exemplar teaches students to copy it. Three teach them that the brief has room in it.
- 03
The plan builds up rather than being written at the end
Students fill in one part of their business plan at a time, starting in Module 3 and finishing in Module 8, each piece attached to the assignment that produces it. By the end they have a plan they built themselves and can defend line by line, instead of a document written the night before it was due.
- 04
Every quiz answer is explained, not just the right one
There are 140 answer options across the 9 quizzes and all 140 carry an explanation. A student who picks the wrong one is told why it is wrong, which is the moment the learning actually happens. Being told only that you were wrong teaches nothing.
- 05
It ends with them running a business, not writing about one
The last stretch of the course is not an essay. Students pitch their idea to people who know them, record what those people put behind them, spend it, sell something, and write back to their backers about how it went.
What we chose not to do
The course could have taken payments. A student shop with a checkout would have been easier to explain and would have looked more impressive.
We did not build it, because every payment platform requires the person holding the account to be at least 18. A student under that age would need a parent to be the merchant, which means the young person ends up helping run a business that is legally somebody else's. Taking no payment at all is what lets a thirteen year old own theirs.
The same thinking runs through the rest of it. A student's pitch page is private unless they share the link and can be switched off at any moment. Nothing a student enters into a class showcase is visible to anyone outside the class until their teacher has approved it.
Where it is still thin
We have not published a mapping between our modules and any provincial curriculum document, so a teacher who needs to show coverage of specific expectations has to do that reading themselves for now. That is on the list.
Read it yourself
Modules 1 to 8 are published in full with no account. That is the honest way to judge whether any of the above is true.