Work in progress — A sandbox model for teaching entrepreneurship

While major research universities enjoy a large pool of cutting-edge research projects for technology transfer, small liberal art institutions have to adopt a different model for promoting entrepreneurship due to resource limits. We propose a sandbox model for teaching entrepreneurship in a software engineering class. Student activities are closely monitored and coordinated by the instructor. Introduction of entrepreneurial thinking is tightly integrated with the milestone projects in the class. Students are allowed to fail, but they can always resume from the next milestone. We admit that the sandbox approach is highly debatable. Some faculty members believe that a fixed project topic may limit the creativity of students. On the other hand, we argue for the effectiveness of the approach. A good coverage of entrepreneurship topics can be achieved without requiring extra room in the curriculum. We report our preliminary experiences of implementing the sandbox model at Hofstra University.