BookDecision — Book, Substack, or Neither?
A 5-round long-form Express simulation for Director+ professionals weighing a multi-year publishing commitment.
About this simulation
A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on a high-school senior running her FFA chapter's greenhouse spring plant sale as a business, from January to May: scheduling production backward from the sale date crop by crop, planning the crop mix from last year's sales records, controlling whiteflies by integrated pest management and using a pesticide only as its label allows (FIFRA, 7 U.S.C.
136j(a)(2)(G)), pricing a perishable crop from cost per flat with the markdowns planned before the sale, keeping everyone out of a treated greenhouse until the label's restricted-entry interval is over (40 CFR 170.407 and 170.305), running the sale, marking down and donating what is left and closing the enterprise records for the Supervised Agricultural Experience, for high-school Career and Technical Education in agriculture and horticulture, with the FFA SAE and state pesticide applicator certification (adults) named as hooks.
Kenna Rozendaal, 18, is the fictional greenhouse manager of the FFA chapter at the fictional Oneota Bluffs High School in Decorah, Iowa, in the spring of 2028.
Round by round you decide how the season is scheduled and what is grown, how to handle whiteflies and how to price the plants, what to do about spider mites two days before the sale and how the sale runs, and what happens to the flats left over and the season's books; at each decision point the season is projected again with the decisions taken so far.
Each round is scored on the flats sold, the extra crew hours, the shrink rate, the sale profit and customer satisfaction, with open violations shown alongside; using a pesticide against its label, or letting people into a treated greenhouse before the restricted-entry interval is over, caps the score. English with Spanish.
What participants learn
After the session, participants will be able to:
- Plan production backward from the sale date crop by crop, staggering sowings, ordering plugs by date and setting the crop mix from last year's sales and the pre-orders
- Price a perishable crop per flat from cost with a local market check, and write the markdown and donation plan together with the price list
- Choose pest controls within the rules by scouting with sticky cards, isolating, using a biological control or a product applied at the label rate by a certified applicator, and respecting the restricted-entry interval
- Run a plant sale as an operation with pulled pre-orders, staffed shifts, a card reader, a count sheet, care tags and watering
- Analyze the season's records by cost per flat, sales and shrink by crop and profit against plan to set next year's plan
Who it is for
An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.
How a session runs
- The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
- Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results. The first round opens with: 11 January: the schedule and the crop mix.
- The simulation can be run in English, Español.
- The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.