Business law class prepares young entrepreneurs

Libby’s Business Law class, taught by Michelle Foss, has been competing in the Montana High School Business Challenge.

This last semester, Foss entered four teams in the challenge. At the end of the simulation, one of her teams turned out to be third in the state.  

The team members were Eli Alspaw, Hailey Craig, and Paige Shaver. They will each receive a $250 scholarship for their accomplishment.  

The challenge is a computer simulation where students make decisions each week, which represents one business quarter.  

The game is eight weeks during a semester, or the equivalent of two years in their business cycle.  

Each team makes its own decisions in research and development, marketing and advertising, production and inventory, pricing, ethics, hiring and firing, and financing and debt management.   

Students can form teams and make all the operating decisions for the simulated business which manufactures and markets a compact Blu-ray disc player. The decisions are matched against one another as they all “go to market” competing against the others.  

The Montana Council on Economic Education game administrator collects the team decisions, evaluates them against other teams, computes the sales for that quarter, and returns the results to the teams, who then make new decisions.

Each team starts with a stock price of $25. The final stock price is based on total profits, profit trends, return on sales, stock price and dividends.

Each semester, an estimated 1,400 students enter the competition from 60 schools across the state. This year there were 220 teams competing.  

(Libby High School student Hailey Craig offers a guest opinion on the competition.)