BBC: Meet the Youngsters Running Their Wwn Companies

From BBC:

Thomas Suarez is typical in that way. He is working on a patent-pending 3D printer which, he says, will work 10 times faster than the MakerBot model he uses at home.

But in most other ways, Thomas is anything but typical. At 15, he is a seasoned businessman.

The teenager tinkers with 3D printing technology when he's not in school or codes new apps for smartphones or Google Glass (which he wears all the time outside of school).

He also has his own company, CarrotCorp, formed when he was 11 years old and making his first apps.

By contrast, at the Incubator School in Los Angeles, becoming a billionaire is the goal for many kids.

In class, they combine the jargon of corporate America with the language of video games. Instead of graduating, they "level up". They discuss profit-sharing strategies for the school lemonade stand.

And at this school, starting a business is not only encouraged, it will soon become a mandatory part of the curriculum.

"It's an entrepreneurship-themed school that focuses on innovation. It wants kids to launch start-ups and we think of ourselves as a start-up, so we're constantly refining, experimenting, iterating our product, which is trying to create an education that kids actually want," says Sujata Bhatt, the school's founder and head teacher.

The school looks like a Silicon Valley start-up, with motivational posters on the walls and laptops and tablets on the desks. Only the people using and creating the technology here are children aged 11 to 13.

When you ask the kids at this school what they want to do when they grow up, nearly all of them say they want to run their own companies.

The Incubator School, which is a pilot programme in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is just one year old.

When asked if she worries about creating greedy students or if the kids are too young for so much business education, Ms Bhatt says the school philosophy is to nurture an entrepreneurial spirit.

"One of the things we are exploring is the teamwork, we're exploring collaboration, we're exploring the ethics of profit sharing. Social entrepreneurship is as important as money-making business entrepreneurship," she says.

"We want kids to look at the world and say, 'These are problems that need to be solved and what are the tools I need to solve those problems to make the world a better place?'"

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28129967