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Classroom Experience Design Information Systems Strategy
To help ease the stress of transitioning from college to the workforce, the ExDM department at BYU Marriott added a new professional prep class for its students.
With its emphasis on teaching students to discover solutions to seemingly impossible problems, BYU Marriott's course Strategy 421: Strategy Implementation is one that Sherlock Holmes would have approved of.
Imagine hacking into a Furby, picking a lockbox, shooting targets with Nerf guns, diving into piles of (clean) trash, and sliding under string “laser beams,” all with the end goal of identifying—and then fixing—vulnerabilities in a wireless computer security system.
Walking timidly into the Tanner Building for her first class of her freshman year, Melissa Trautman didn’t know what to expect from the class or from her future BYU experience. She hoped the course title, Creating a Good Life, would come to literal fruition, but she had no idea the significant impact the class would have on her life.
It’s the new adage of the marketing world: the secret to happiness is spending money on experiences, not things. While the desire for the latest gizmo has long fueled a culture of consumption, lasting memories can make a business a winning one.
Sickness, car wrecks, and births—INTEX, the weeklong rite of passage for information systems students, stops for nothing.
Three tech-savvy students have redesigned a BYU rite of passage: the search for Provo housing.
Class begins with everyone looking intently at the same spreadsheet on their laptops. Today’s task: learning how to calculate financial ratios like debt-to-equity, asset turnover, and net profit margin—with the click of a button.
A painted papier-mâché mask with a lively hodgepodge of primary colors and an obvious grin sits quietly in a Marriott School office, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the professor sitting only a few feet away. 
With laptops charged, whiteboards cleared, and markers ready, it’s now up to the Executive MBA students’ careful positioning and strategic thinking to navigate the intricacies of a simulated marketplace. 
It’s hard for many students to remember the days before iPods, Hulu, Twitter, and Skype. If you were to stroll across campus, odds are you could find all of these and many more technologies in use—they have become central to university life.
Bruce Hymas and his teammates had sixteen connectors, fifty-four sticks, and three minutes. The task: build a tower that holds up a golf ball—and make the tower taller than everyone else’s.
Filled with fine granular rock and mineral particles, sandboxes are a child’s paradise. They foster creativity in a realm of seemingly endless possibilities. The pull is so strong they often attract even the family cat.
An average person attending a lecture about “model-driven system development” would likely be lost and confused within minutes. Likewise, as Stephen Liddle has attempted to teach this concept in his ISys 532 class, he is often met with blank stares.