Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 59 they create a deliverable and either continue to work on improving it after receiving feedback from the mentor or move on to the next subtask in the story. I will describe briefly the stories that the students work within (they each last anywhere from 6 to 9 weeks). Then I want to consid- er what these courses are really teaching from the perspective of the framework of cognitive processes that I described in Chapter 4. COURSE 1: “CASH CRISIS’— ANALYZE AND SOLVE FINANCIAL BUSINESS PROBLEMS The story for this course is that a family that owns a winery business hires a consulting firm to help determine why the bank denied the re- newal of a loan. The students, working in the role of assistant consul- tants, first conduct financial analyses to determine problems within the business. Next, they conduct a root cause analysis to determine the underlying causes of the problems affecting the business. Students then develop solutions to address the problems and write a report out- lining the solutions, including 5-year financial projections. COURSE 2: “GOING ONLINE”— TAKE A SMALL BUSINESS ONLINE Students are contacted by an investor who is interested in starting an online business selling gift baskets. She wants the students to help her plan what the business will sell in the gift baskets and to design the user interface for the website. She is leaving it up to the students to determine what sort of gift basket business they want to design. Her immediate concern is seeing what the site would look like, and how it would function, to make sure she will have a good design to impress prospective buyers. Students begin by interviewing prospective customers and seeing how they typically buy such items online, to learn from their usage patterns and to determine common breakdowns in the usual process. Next, students produce expected user scenarios for the “personas” they identify as being prospective users of the site. They then define