Drexel LeBow Dominates MikesBikes World Competition

Many business schools across the globe use the business simulation tool MikesBikes, yet Drexel LeBow undergraduate students landed in two of the top eight spots in the 2012 MikesBikes World Championship. Weilei Yu, Aaron Hartmann, Summer Rose Horan and Daniel Pinto comprised the team SAPYU, which placed second in the competition. Jerome Lynch was the sole member of his team, Vanquish Cycles, which placed eighth.

The competition ran in two rounds, with a qualification round identifying the top eight teams that went on to compete in the championship.

Jodi Cataline, an associate clinical professor of business who teaches BUS 102, the freshman-level course which utilizes MikesBikes, says the tool is very useful in helping students to understand complex issues across functional disciplines of business and practice developing strategy. But most importantly, it provides them with the experiential learning opportunity of putting their newly learned business acumen into practice.

“Students love MikesBikes. They compete against other teams within Drexel, and they get really into the competition. They also love that it's not a professor lecturing to them about operations management or strategy; they get their hands dirty, learn by trial and error, and put the new knowledge they recently gained from lectures and textbooks to the test.”

She says the cool thing about Drexel’s domination in the competition is that these students took the initiative to participate on their own after being invited by MikesBikes. “They obviously embraced the use of the simulation and the experiential learning component, and they got together on their own time and took the simulation to another level. It gives Drexel LeBow a little bit of notoriety amongst the other universities worldwide that use MikesBikes to have our name listed twice among the top eight teams.”