About

Know Opportunity™ is a product of Auctus Ventures, a firm with experience in developing and marketing educational programs and higher education initiatives. Know Opportunity focuses on addressing the gap between contextualized learning and real world application of skills.

Know Opportunity was originally developed as a contextualized learning experience, giving students a taste of entrepreneurship. However, over the past 18 months, we’ve sent prototypes of the game to board game shops, individuals, high schools and colleges throughout the US, as well as places like Trinidad, South Africa, Morocco, England, and The Netherlands. In this phase of feedback, it became apparent that there is a great calling for the game.

So, we took all the feedback, made some changes and redesigned the game to be more standard sized, and now we’re ready to start production on a mass production run of the game! Even though the focus isn’t primarily in the high school classroom, Know Opportunity still includes a year-long curriculum (optional) with opportunities for expository writing (business plan development), economics based math (profit and loss tracking), public speaking (elevator pitches to mock investors) and general business skills.

View our journey

How Does This Apply to The Real World?

For those of the upcoming generations, adaptability will be key to a successful lifestyle, and entrepreneurs tend to exhibit such traits. The Know Opportunity program works to teach students the fundamentals of entrepreneurship in an applicable, real-world way through contextualized teaching.

Global Commerce: Part of the challenge facing entrepreneurship today (at least in how it’s commonly taught) is the lack of acknowledgement of addressing a global market. Know Opportunity works to integrate the idea of global commerce into the game, to give players a foundation for exploring opportunities for success that don’t solely rely on their geography.
Extemporaneous Speaking: Throughout the course (as well as being ingrained in the board game), students are asked to give “pitch sessions” to the class. Sometimes, these are rehearsed and planned in advance, but often they are extemporaneous and done on the spot. This helps students develop critical interpersonal communication skills through being able to clearly and articulately deliver a message to a specific audience.
Business/Finance Mathematics: In the board game, students keep track of their incomes and expenses on their income statements, teaching them valuable lessons about cash flow, balances and investments.
Expository Writing: Know Opportunity was designed to be integrated with Youth Entrepreneurship Programs across the country, or other applicable courses. Students learn throughout the course how to identify target markets and potential business opportunities, which helps build the foundation of a business plan. Again, this reinforces the demanding critical, real-world skill of strong writing and articulation.

Board Game

For At-Home Players: the game is set to be a standard price and ultimately works to expand your vision of what opportunity looks like. We all have friends or connections overseas, but have you ever thought how you might work with that person? No board game can teach you everything there is to know about entrepreneurship, but the obstacles and rewards in the game are almost all taken from real-life scenarios, and the idea is to encourage you to think about building your ideal lifestyle, and not be bogged down by your geographic location.Global commerce is insanely easy to access, even for the little guys. And this game will get you thinking how to be a part of global entrepreneurship.

For Players in a KO Course: Accompanying the course and curriculum is an educational board game designed specifically to resonate with students, primarily at the high school level. There has already been considerable interest in adapting the program into a middle-school program. As students play the game, they will be able to better apply the lessons learned in the course.

Income Statement

Entrepreneurs learn quickly how every little thing adds up. It’s a life lesson that students quickly learn translates to everyday life. Students gain an understanding of real world economics – through weighing the cost of doing business. From buying a new suit in order to impress at the next client meeting, to upgrading to a new computer, these expenses are tracked on the Income Statement Ledger Sheet. In addition, students track risk. Investment opportunities require a financial commitment without a guarantee as to whether or not they will pay off in the future.

And here’s a short informative video (less than 2 minutes long)

CLASSROOMS: Course (full 36-week curriculum)

We were asked to develop a curriculum that reiterated the concepts taught by the board game. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we accepted the challenge. We worked with a 30-year tenured educator at a nationally ranked charter high school to develop the curriculum and we were able to teach a pilot course using the material we created.

The course includes 36 weeks worth of curriculum and is intentionally structured to be modifiable by each school and district. Depending on each individual school’s flexibility with courses, instructors and budget, Know Opportunity includes enough material to cover a 5-day-per-week class, as well as a two- or three-day-a-week class.

This gives each instructor the ability to customize material as needed and base their pace on students’ learning patterns.

Profiles

Toward the beginning of the school year, students are assigned pre-developed profiles that give a job title, business/industry, foreign connection, salary, potential obstacles and more. Throughout the course of the first semester, students will usurp this role. This provides a thorough level of learning – students are engaged and during class discussions have to relate lessons/problems to their own profile, which drives engagement and stimulates the deep learning thought process.

Using the compounded information from the first half of the class, students will in the second half of the class come up with their own profiles.