From Prototype to Pitch: Learning Entrepreneurial Communication Through Gameplay

This study examines an "airplane storytelling game" used in an entrepreneurship elective to teach communication skills to software students. Over four annual cohorts involving 48 undergraduates organized into teams of three to four, participants built paper aircraft prototypes and delivered pitches to judges, with prototype and pitch weighted equally. The work is positioned within experiential learning and serious-game research, and it argues that a simple, low-technology activity can expose assumptions about what drives entrepreneurial success.

The central finding is a consistent pattern of misallocated effort. Technically oriented teams devoted most of their time to refining their prototypes and typically improvised their pitches late in the process, despite the equal weighting of both components. Notably, more persuasive pitches frequently outscored technically superior designs, which led students to recognize that technical value must be communicated effectively to influence stakeholders. The authors describe this gap as "experiential misalignment," arguing that the activity makes the cost of underinvesting in communication visible in a way that lectures rarely do.

The evidence base is qualitative and observational, drawn from a single programme and a single instructor who also served as designer, judge, and analyst. Cohort-level observations were not systematically timed, so claims about effort allocation rest on pattern recognition rather than measurement. These limitations constrain generalization beyond this context, though the authors present the activity as a low-cost, replicable starting point for examining how entrepreneurial communication is valued and learned.