SAS AT Entrepreneurship: Mr. Smith
Course Description
Entrepreneurship provides real-world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a company. This class combines theory with hands-on practice. The goal is to give students a framework to test the business model of a startup while creating all of the pressures and demands of the real world at an early stage startup. They will learn marketing, finance, and other business disciplines, while also acquiring organizational skills such as time management and leadership development. The class is a vehicle to develop character, intellect, and resilience in students. Students start the semester with an immediate immersion into the Lean Startup methodology adopted from University of California Berkeley and Design Thinking techniques from Stanford University, as they develop skills through working in the field, observing and interviewing to discover problems, and learning techniques for validating hypotheses. In this course, students learn by doing as they are given real problems and collaborate with real entrepreneurs.
The class is designed to give students the experience of how to work as a team and turn an idea into a company. Students work with carefully selected Singapore entrepreneurs, who present real and urgent business problems with hard deliverables and deadlines. Students learn processes including customer development, agile development and rapid prototyping. Students’ curiosity and sense of urgency drives the curriculum, while the course instructors guide students’ questions, providing students with the scaffolding, resources, skills and background necessary to better understand the complexities and interconnectedness of business model blocks and a startup venture’s limited resources. Throughout the course, students will learn to problem solve, think critically, make well-informed decisions, communicate effectively, and engage in productive and successful teamwork. In the final portion of the course, students use everything they’ve learned about entrepreneurship and group work to launch their own startups.
This course has been developed with the assistance from the Venturewell Group including professors from University of California Berkeley and Stanford University. The Advanced Topic (AT) designation indicates a course is at university level, putting it at or above the level of a traditional Advanced Placement (AP) course. The course requires rigorous study and emphasizes in-depth research. Like an AP course, this course has a grade point weighting of 0.5 for the duration of the course.