How to Drive Student Engagement with Business Simulation

Proven Strategies from the University of Nottingham

Ask most educators how they measure student engagement, and they’ll talk about attendance rates or assignment completion. Ask Dr David Achtzehn from the University of Nottingham, and he’ll tell you something different: his students averaged 72 hours on a business simulation last semester – and nobody made them do it.

That figure comes from Evolution’s built-in engagement dashboard, which tracks exactly how much time each student spends in the online business simulation, how many decisions they make, and how many pages they read. And it turns out the number is extraordinary – not just as a vanity metric, but because it correlates directly with final grades.

In our May 2026 webinar, Dr Achtzehn joined SimVenture CEO and Co-Founder Peter Harrington to share 8 years of experience using business simulation with cohorts ranging from 30 MBA students to 300 undergraduates. What followed was one of the most practical, evidence-rich conversations we’ve had about what actually works in entrepreneurship education – and why.

The Problem Business Simulation Solves

Dr Achtzehn’s starting point was honest. Before introducing Evolution, Nottingham’s assessment structure was heavy on exams and generic coursework – formats that employers weren’t convinced by and that were increasingly vulnerable to AI-generated submissions.

“Employers didn’t really like us using too many exams because it doesn’t really reflect the real world,” Dr Achtzehn noted. “And courseworks – you’ve got so much AI use these days, it’s really hard to AI-proof them.”

Business simulation offered something different: an assessment where students have to make hundreds of individual decisions, justify them, and live with the consequences. No two students end up in the same place. And that, as it turns out, makes it both more engaging and significantly harder for AI to replicate.

What the Data Actually Shows

The engagement numbers Dr Achtzehn shared are striking. From a cohort of 300 final-year undergraduates:

• Average time spent in the simulation: 72 hours
• Top individual engagement: over 100 hours
• Students went through thousands of pages of in-simulation content, voluntarily
• Top company valuations reached £33 million by year 5 of the simulation

“If I would give them a reading list and say, read for 30 hours on my module, I doubt they’d read for more than five hours,” he said. “This is them voting with their feet.”

But perhaps the most compelling data point: when Dr Achtzehn compared students’ grade on their written report to their performance in the simulation, the correlation was remarkably strong. Students who did well in the simulation wrote better reports. Students who engaged more deeply performed better overall.

Why Students Engage: The Authentic Assessment Argument

At the heart of Dr Achtzehn’s approach is a concept with solid academic grounding: authentic assessment. Coined by educator Grant Wiggins, authentic assessment is defined as providing students with “appropriate opportunity to rehearse, practise, consult resources, get feedback and refine performance.” Business simulation, he argues, is one of the best tools we have for delivering on that definition.

What makes Evolution particularly effective for authentic assessment, in his experience:

• It’s realistic – based on real business numbers and dynamics
• It’s challenging – students have to survive, not just succeed
• It offers continuous feedback – students can run a quarter in minutes and see the consequences
• It’s scalable – works from cohorts of 30 to 1,000+ students
• It generates unique outputs – no two students end up with the same company

That last point matters more than it might seem. When every student produces genuinely different work, academic misconduct becomes harder to sustain, AI assistance becomes less relevant to the core assessment, and marking becomes considerably more interesting.

“The reports are vastly different, even though everyone played the same game,” Dr Achtzehn noted. “I find that quite fascinating in itself, and it makes it more fun to read the reports.”

How to Structure It: Practical Advice from 8 Years in the Classroom

Dr Achtzehn’s approach has evolved significantly over 8 years, and he was generous in sharing specifics. Here’s what he currently uses for final-year undergraduates:

Scaffolding for Different Levels

• First-years: Use the Growth Scenario (pre-established company) to ease them in. Focus on experimentation, not grades. Keep pressure low.
• Final-year undergraduates: Practise in groups using the Growth Scenario, then complete a solo assessed run of the Seed Scenario (starting from scratch). Groups for practice; individual for assessment.
• MBA students: Group work throughout, with each group taking on a head-of-department role to limit the analytical scope and mirror real organisational structures.

Keeping Engagement up Through Difficult Moments

• Schedule small-group seminars early in the semester to get students logged in and started
• Track engagement data weekly – send a personal email to anyone who hasn’t watched the intro video
• Build stepping stones into the assessment: set KPIs, run the simulation, analyse, reflect – each stage is a checkpoint
• Book a room after lectures for informal drop-in support: “It’s never an hour. But it’s that sort of ‘you’re already here’ energy.”

On AI and Assessment Integrity

The honest answer from Dr Achtzehn: nothing is fully AI-proof forever. But business simulation comes closer than most.

“It’s really hard to use AI for making the decisions, and therefore to justify the decisions,” he said. “Each student ends up in a very different place – so even if they use AI to help summarise their report, the core of the assessment is their unique data set, their unique decisions, their unique company.”

His suggestion: embrace the shift rather than fight it. The skill of using AI effectively to digest large amounts of data and justify decisions is exactly the kind of skill students will need in the workplace. Business simulation creates the perfect context to practise it.

The Moment it Clicks

Peter Harrington, SimVenture’s CEO & Co-founder, reflected on a pattern he’s observed over 20 years of seeing educators use the business simulation with students: the emotional response.

“I’ve literally had people describe being in tears when they realised ‘I’ve got it now,'” he said. “They’d learned so much about business and overcome some of those flawed assumptions in their head – the ones that were getting in the way.”

It’s a long way from the experience of revising for an exam. And it might be the best argument for business simulation that we have: not the data, not the AI-resistance, not the scalability – but the fact that students feel something. That they emerge from the experience having genuinely run a business, even if only a virtual one.

When was the last time a student posted on social media about how they did in an exam?

Want to See Evolution in Action?

Watch the full webinar via our YouTube channel here, or request a free online demo of Evolution to explore the simulation with your own goals in mind.