The Capsim Challenge is a competition for university students all over the world to run a business simulation. Students can get in teams, or work alone to run their business. They are scored on the Balance Score Card, which looks at profit, investments, production and more.
A group of BYU-Idaho students learned about the Capsim Challenge in the Business Fundamentals class. The class requires students to compete in the business simulation against their classmates. After winning first place in their class competition, Frederico Pregnolato wanted to know more about the global competition.
“I’m not a very competitive person, but I just love the feeling of getting up there and trying to find which strategies would work the best,” Pregnolato said.
The first phase of the global competition is competing against the computer. That score then goes against all the teams to see who is qualified to go on to finals. Pregnolato, along with Leanna King and Trevor King, got first place in the qualifications round. Then they moved on to the finals.
“I didn’t think that we were going to qualify for finals in the first place. I thought that we did well, but you know 300 people, lots of probably really good people. And then we saw that we got in first place in the qualifications and we were like, ‘Oh wow this is real, we’re probably going to get into the finals!’” Pregnolato said.
Pregnolato said the most important part about the experience is what he and his team learned.
“Education has no meaning if all you want is to get an A at the end of the class. To me, the most important thing is, what am I learning? So we took this challenge to actually prove that we are learning something,” Prenolato said.