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Third-Year

Build a Business

Ultimately, the study of human culture leads students to look creatively at futurism as they plan a complex world for the year 3000. Third-year students imagine and design a society that includes inventing a language, inhabitants and their evolution, natural resources, geography and more. They even compose a national anthem and play it on the dulcimer they build from scratch.

In an effort to finance and support their society, students experiment with a variety of economic systems from tribal bartering to free enterprise and consumer management. Your entrepreneurs invent and market a novel product that becomes the economic foundation of their future society.

Once students brainstorm a product for the market, the youngsters design advertising campaigns that include logos and slogans. They draft magazine ads and write and produce television commercials based on their storyboards. The storyboards come to life when students act in the commercials they designed, learning how to read cue cards, face the camera at different angles, and project their voices properly.

As part of the unit, students learn to use an architectural design “CAD program” to create a floor plan of their headquarters’ buildings, creating 3D renderings of their designs, produce interior design boards and build a model presidential office room. This sets the stage for their year-end production.

Bringing past practices into the modern era, students produce a PowerPoint presentation for a mock Shark Tank experience, which reflects their marketing strategy. During their performance, parents ask students detailed questions about their business to determine how well students have brought their business plan to life.

CAD: Architecture Design on the Computer

While the anthropologists and paleontologists of First- and Second-Year Studies are building caves for their ancestors, so too must the futurists in the ThirdYear Studies house their inhabitants as well as their businesses. Thus, they experiment with form, function, design, and layouts as they draft blueprints and site plans in their study of architecture. Once students have drafted by hand, they use a computer-animated design (CAD) program to draft on the computer.

The year culminates in bringing academic enrichment and the arts together. Students compete in an economics game, using all the skills and knowledge, and finite decisions, housed in their business plan. We are happy to report that over 90% of our students earn over $50,000 G·tec dollars in their year of business!!