How to Make Business Class Fun

I've sat through some genuinely boring business classes. I've also sat through ones — fewer than I'd like — that were the most interesting hours of my college career. The difference between those two categories had almost nothing to do with the subject matter and almost everything to do with how the class was taught. Business is one of the most inherently interesting subjects you can teach. If your business class is boring, the subject isn't the problem.

I'm Aaron Heienickle, the founder of Skypig and creator of Products: The Card Game. I studied marketing at the University of Missouri while running my own company on the side, so I've seen the gap between classroom business education and the real thing up close. I've also worked with teachers in classrooms, conference rooms, and family game nights, helping them rethink how business gets taught at the high school and college level.

What Makes a Business Class Boring

The pattern is almost always the same. The class is taught primarily through lectures, the examples used are abstract or out of date, and students are evaluated mostly on memorization. The result is a class that feels disconnected from any real business activity. Students learn the vocabulary without learning the work. They graduate able to define "value proposition" without ever having created one.

The fix is structural. A great business class isn't about better slides or more entertaining lectures — it's about getting students into business activity faster and more often. Every concept students are supposed to learn should be tied to an activity where they have to actually use it. This is the principle behind experiential learning and gamified learning — both have decades of research behind them showing they outperform traditional instruction in business and entrepreneurship contexts.

The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship has been one of the strongest voices for activity-based business education in K-12 settings. Their materials consistently emphasize student-led projects, real-world problem-solving, and frequent presentation opportunities — the same elements I've seen work in every great business class I've ever observed.

What I'd Recommend Doing Instead

If you teach business and want students to actually look forward to your class, my recommendations are simple but require commitment.

First, replace at least one lecture per week with a structured activity. It doesn't have to be elaborate. A 30-minute Shark Tank–style pitch round, a customer interview role-play, a quick market sizing exercise. The point is to get students using the concepts, not just hearing about them. I've written about the Shark Tank lesson plan and other favorite entrepreneurship class activities if you want concrete starting points.

Second, bring in real businesses. Local founders, alumni who started companies, parents who run small businesses — anyone who can talk about actual business decisions they've made and what happened. The contrast between a textbook explanation of pricing and a real founder explaining how they set their first price is enormous. Students remember the founder. They forget the textbook.

Third, build in at least one ongoing project that runs through the semester — a student venture, a market research project, a real business plan for something that could actually exist. The continuity matters. Students develop a real relationship with the work in a way that one-off assignments don't allow. It's the same principle behind running a pitch competition: the cumulative work is where the learning compounds.

Fourth — and this might be the most underrated — let students teach each other. Every business class I've loved had moments where students were explaining concepts to each other rather than just receiving them from the instructor. Peer teaching forces a depth of understanding that passive listening never produces.

If you do these four things, your business class won't just be more fun. It'll actually teach more. The fun is a side effect of the engagement, not the goal of it.

I've watched too many bright students leave business classes convinced that business is dry and bureaucratic. It isn't. It's one of the most interesting things humans do. Your job, if you teach it, is to make sure your students get to see it that way.