StartUp_EU: Using Game‐Based Learning and Web 2.0 Technologies to Teach Entrepreneurship to Secondary Education Students.

The present paper reports on the pre‐piloting of the StartUp_EU Lifelong Learning European Project. StartUp_EU is a project for secondary schools that simulating the excitement and creative innovation of starting up a new company. The project developed a series of mini‐games, an encompassing Web2.0 platform and a collaborative competition for secondary school students, between 14 and 18 years of age, to inspire high tech entrepreneurship. The platform was based on the open source ILIAS Learning Content Management (LCM) platform and the mini‐games were developed in 3D Flash. Each mini‐game focused on a specific challenge/task associated with business start‐up. 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. Students had to fill in a pre‐competition questionnaire at the beginning and a post‐competition questionnaire at the end of the competition. The questionnaires were completed online and the pre‐piloting lasted eight weeks, from the middle of January 2013 until the middle of March 2013. Forty seven (47) students took part in the prepiloting with the vast majority of them never taken part in a competition about entrepreneurship and had limited or no experience with game‐based learning. This paper presents the results of the pre and post questionnaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]