The success of The Apprentice has popularised the business world, but arguably not among young people. However, Deloitte & Touche has teamed up with BrandGames to try to achieve what Donald Trump and Alan Sugar couldn't - and enthuse high-school students about the world of business. How? With a new virtual world.
It’s called The Virtual Team Challenge for High Schools Event (or VTCHS for short), and is a competition involving more than 5,500 students from 100 US high-schools. Students form teams of four, create avatars, and then in a virtual world have to run an events-planning company hosting a charity festival.
The idea is to teach them about business, ethics, money and decision-making, although it sounds like it’ll give a decent grounding in virtual worlds too. New York based BrandGames supplied the technology, which took a year to develop according to EVP of marketing Jim Wexler:
“Deloitte had a vision for this--and we’ve been helping brands and companies use games as part of both their consumer-facing and internal communications for years, so our toolset was a perfect fit… it made sense for them to explore how to use this format to make their learnings more effective.”
The company certainly sounds like it knows what it’s doing - other clients include GM, Coca-Cola and Taco Bell - and the VTCHS event ties in with this idea of making formerly dry subjects more engaging for youngsters who’ve grown up with games and (latterly) virtual worlds.
(via Online Media Daily)
0 comments