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Classroom Information Systems Marketing
In a world of seemingly endless choices, today’s consumers don’t often travel a linear path when making a purchase.
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.
You’re scrolling through Facebook, and a video catches your eye. A man is riding a horse on a beach and telling you he is the man your man could smell like.
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.
After standing on one foot while trying to decide which printer to buy, students hobble out of 340 TNRB with some extra credit but without the slightest clue what their answers will be used for.
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.
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.
This class doesn’t have a textbook. In fact, some of the required reading comes from Wikipedia, a taboo for just about any other class on campus. But the syllabus states it bluntly: “Text: none; it would be outdated anyway.”
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.