Helping kids to cultivate a head for business at school

A distinction at the recent pan-European Junior Achievement (JA) competition for young entrepreneurship by a team calling itself Isometricks that developed a fun and education brain game, has shone a spotlight on the work of the University of Macedonia’s Experimental Junior High School in Thessaloniki, northern Greece.

“I began trying to develop virtual businesses with my students in 2005, before JA Greece was created,” the economist and driving force of the project Anna Matsiori tells Kathimerini. “It is the best way to apply modern educational methods like experiential learning of economic concepts,” she says, adding that calls for including business on the school curriculum have increased in the past decade.

Matsiori also wants to take the program “one step further” by “cultivating altruism” in her students. “I want to encourage them to make products that are useful to society and helpful to its more vulnerable members,” she says.