Pitch Card Creator — six boxes between an idea and a pitch
There is no scenario handed out here and no countdown running. A student fills in six fields about a business idea they invent themselves — product name, slogan, the problem, the solution, who it is for, and a price — then taps the eye icon and the six answers assemble into a clean card. That card is not the deliverable. It is the cue sheet they hold while they talk.
The six boxes are the argument, in order
Business English courses teach the elevator pitch as a list of components and students forget the list. Here the structure is the form itself: you cannot describe a solution before you have named the problem, because the problem box comes first and sits above it on the card. Filling the fields in sequence means the student has already built a logical argument by the time they open their mouth. The pitch afterwards is a reading of something they reasoned through, not an improvisation they will lose control of halfway.
Making the price box do real work
The price field looks decorative and is the most useful constraint on the screen. A number forces a claim about value, and a claim about value forces justification — which is where comparatives, quantifiers, and the whole language of persuasion actually appear. Ask one question after every pitch and nothing else: why that price and not half of it? Watch how much more language comes out of that question than out of "tell us more about your product".
Specific audiences produce specific English
The target field carries a hint in the app — e.g. Students — and "students" is precisely the answer to push back on. "Everyone" and "young people" let a learner stay in vague, safe vocabulary forever. "First-year engineering students who live in dormitories and cook twice a week" cannot be described in vague vocabulary; it requires relative clauses and concrete nouns. Reject the first target audience every student writes and ask for a narrower one. The language improves immediately, without any grammar instruction.
Three ways to run it in a classroom
As an incubator: small groups build one card together, arguing in English about what the real problem is, which is where most of the speaking actually happens. As a gallery walk: everyone leaves their device open on preview mode and the class circulates, reading and questioning, so twenty pitches get heard in ten minutes instead of two. As a panel: one student presents, the rest play investors and must ask at least one question each, which turns passive listeners into people with a job.
Reading the card is not the exercise
The most common failure is a student who reads all six fields aloud in order and sits down. Set the rule that the card must stay visible but cannot be read verbatim — it is there for the moment they lose their thread, like notes for a speech. That single restriction converts the activity from a reading task into a speaking task. For groups that find this too hard at first, allow the slogan to be read exactly as written and everything else to be spoken freely; most learners stop needing the concession within two rounds.
Level and timing
B1 upward, and genuinely useful through C1 with professionals. Budget twenty minutes for the cards and twenty for the pitches. With lower levels, supply openings on the board — "the problem we noticed is…", "our answer to that is…" — and accept a slower delivery. With advanced groups, remove the preparation time: give them four minutes to fill the card and pitch immediately, which is much closer to the pressure of a real meeting than a rehearsed presentation ever is.
Goes well with
Further reading
Error Correction in Speaking — when to interrupt and when to wait
CEFR Levels Explained — what A1 to C2 actually mean in a classroom