“Anything is possible” — Teaching Entrepreneurship in an interactive K-12 workshop

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) at the Penn State Berks Campus conducts Entrepreneurship Workshops facilitated by college student mentors for middle and high school students from inner-city Reading, PA. These workshops serve to incubate early entrepreneurship exposure, promote creative problem solving, and to highlight how entrepreneurship attracts students from multidisciplinary backgrounds. Following an overview of business planning, the Penn State Berks Engineering Entrepreneurship students create their own condensed business model presentations that examine the simulated exercise of “Problems with Pizza.” In this paper, we explore how the mentor-taught workshops influence K-12 students´ perceptions of entrepreneurship as a feasible, alternate career choice and how to creatively approach common problems. The paper builds on the current literature of influencing students´ entrepreneurial self-efficacy and provides a successful example of student mentor teaching, specifically the positive effect that it has on students´ attitudes towards entrepreneurship. The paper also further builds the case for entrepreneurship exposure starting at the middle and high school levels.