Entrepreneurship and pedagogical innovation in the classroom through a Scrum-based educational methodology: a practical learning experience in an undergraduate course in Spain

Abstract

[EN] Entrepreneurship at school represents a major challenge of today¿s education at different educational levels. Seemingly more conceived for studies at older ages, several contributions have identified its benefits not only in later grades, but also as early as primary school.

However, turn this specific objective into reality is not an easy task, as motivating students and making them learn in this field require appropriate tools and methodologies. The literature on entrepreneurship promotion in education has provided a wealth of tools that have brought this knowledge to the youngest students. However, much work remains to be done as student engagement is often difficult to achieve and labour market requirements are constantly evolving.

This work attempts to contribute to this topic by explaining the practical learning experience achieved in the subject ¿Fundamentals of Business Administration¿ in the bachelor¿s degree in Informatics Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain through the application a SCRUM based educational methodology. SCRUM is a well-known Agile framework, traditionally used in managing software development. It is designed for teams who break their work into actions that can be completed within fixed duration cycles called ¿sprints¿. Each sprint has a main topic and a challenge attached to it.

Nevertheless, in this practical experiment, the SCRUM basic fundamentals, initially conceived for the area of software development, are used for its application in the different stages of the product/business design process. More concretely, we apply an educational framework called SCRUM Educational Experience (SEE, 2022), to a group of 57 students of the aforementioned course with the aim of managing the whole process that leads them from scratch to develop a business idea and put it into practice in the market.

After the application of the methodology, the results obtained have been very positive as the students have felt motivated throughout the course, the final results of the product/company have been more suitable for the market and the final grades have improved compared to previous courses.