Empresaula - a business simulation platform for students

One of the hardest-hit countries in Europe after the 2008 financial crisis was Spain. Unemployment rates went through the roof. University degrees had been devaluing for years, so for young Spaniards, finding a job became harder than ever before.

As businesses started to seek practical skills rather than university degrees, vocational training programs soared. For graduates of such programs, the unemployment rate was astonishingly lower. However, a lot of students never graduated. The motivation was very low, and the learning methods were stagnant —essentially, reading a textbook in class.
That's when we saw an opportunity to develop an innovative product that could have a profound impact on the next generation of young professionals and entrepreneurs: a realistic simulation platform where students could create and run their own businesses, within a dynamic trading network. The challenge was building one that not only was high-quality and with excellent customer support but also affordable for every public school.

After a few months, we had our first prototype ready, and we started refining it in close collaboration with a local public school. Shortly after, we unveiled it to 30 more regional schools in our first public launch — 25 of them signed upright on the same day.

Since then, we've developed the platform to be as comprehensive as it is today: from a simulated banking and financial system with credit, mortgages, leasings and SEPA-transfers, to a logistic network with realistic transport costs, and even a recommendation engine to suggest purchases and sale opportunities between schools.

To this day, we're very proud of how the product as evolved and enjoy onboarding more and more schools every year. But the best part is seeing new graduates joining the job market, better prepared than ever thanks to a realistic (and fun!) simulation platform.

Company type

Education platform for Schools
Solution

Product Concept & Development
Software Architecture & Development
Data Engineering
Marketing
Everything
Outcome

Schools that adopt our business simulation platform report much higher levels of student engagement. The built-in evaluation system helps teachers target the best aspects to work on a student by student.

Location

Barcelona, Spain

Technologies

Ruby on Rails
JavaScript
TypeScript
Angular
Google Cloud
GraphQL
Kubernetes