Take a look into the past of CA - SBC!
Read about the history of CA - SBC and discover how it has evolved into the game it is today.
Brief History:
CA - SBC (formerly known as SBC and prior to that, HSBC) was once available only in the Ottawa area. It has grown from a modest, local challenge to become a province-wide phenomenon with schools playing from all across Ontario. In 2006, SBC undertook a pilot project with the Manitoba Chamber’s of Commerce to provide SBC to high schools within Manitoba. In total, almost 10,000 students played SBC 2006, including students from schools in Trinidad and Malaysia that teach the Ontario curriculum. In 2007, the Manitoba Chamber’s of Commerce entered into a contract with SBC to provide a customised game for Manitoba high schools.
SBC was unable to provide the competition in 2009 due to a lack of resources, but was determined to find a way to bring back this valuable (and FUN) teaching and learning tool. Now, thanks to sponsorship by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario (CA), Sprott is able to re-introduce this educational program to high schools across Ontario in 2010 as the CA – Sprott Business Competition.
HSBC and SBC have continually provided an excellent and free service thanks to support from the Sprott School at Carleton University, as well as other valuable contributors. We aim to provide a fun way to educate students about the world business for a long time to come as the CA-SBC and we hope you can join us for the ride!
System Evolution:
The Sprott Business Competition began life in 1986 as the High School Business Competition. Loosely based on a PC game named The Executive Challenge, the code was written and compiled in FORTRAN and ran on Carleton University’s CP-6 mainframe computer. Local Ottawa schools (numbers ranged from 10 to 20 participating schools in the early years) were required to FAX or voice message their quarterly decisions to the HSBC team on a weekly basis. Teaching Assistants assigned to the competition would compile the decision inputs and manually enter them into the mainframe. Output was then re-keyed by the TAs into a spreadsheet programme (Lotus 123 at the time) for further analysis, then printed and sent by courier back to the teachers at the schools, who in turn distributed them to their students. It was a labour-intensive process, even with the addition of an email option in the mid-1990s.
In the late 1990s, Sprott's Manager of Computing, Greg Schmidt, approached IS Professor Rob Riordan with an ambitious proposal: Challenge the students in BUSI 3404 (a senior systems design course taught by Riordan at the time) to come up with a design for moving the game to the World Wide Web. The result was version 2 of the HSBC and the first web-enabled competition. The game ran as a test in 2001, with about 200 students from a handful of local schools. The next year, the game was opened up to the Province on Ontario, and almost 1,000 students participated, still predominantly from the Ottawa area where the game was well known. As the competition grew, so did requests for more and more features from students and teachers alike.
After extensive user community feedback and focused sessions with selected students and teachers, the managing committee at Sprott commissioned a complete redesign and rewrite of the game, under the continued direction of Professor Riordan, in 2005. The result is the current version of the game, now dubbed Sprott Business Competition, or SBC for short. The transformation is complete. An entirely new game engine (based largely on the work of Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus Dr. George Haines Jr.), interface and database backend have been created, allowing two versions of the game: SBC Classic and SBC Xtreme. Extensive testing with a large number of students and teachers in the fall of 2006 has produced a highly playable, interactive, intuitive and exciting game for all.