Use the Virtual Voyage as your starting and finishing point. This is the ideal approach if you are teaching "The Foundation and Fortunes of The East India Company", or want to engage a group of younger students quickly. Students can "leap in at the deep end" and find out what challenges and mysteries faced the very first East India Company captains and sailors. If they make mistakes and cannot make a profit, never mind! The real East India Company took quite a long time to master profiteering too.

Once students have learned something of the difficulty of making a successful trading voyage, they can delve into different features on the site and gain essential trading knowledge. Finally, they can return to the Virtual Voyage and apply their knowledge to get a successful outcome.

If you are studying a topic that only relates to one or two resources on the site, or if you have research-ready students, you might instead wish to delve directly into the resources that relate only to your topic. If so, it is worth knowing that the resources are arranged in an order of progressive complexity / difficulty. The timeline and map are useful overview / background tools to begin with, presenting a simplified overview of the topic. The general history of the company goes into more detail, but is straightforwardly sequential.

The Running The World feature ideally requires some basic background knowledge about the locations of the places in relation to each other. The Bombay feature, although a straight words and pictures resource, is designed for older students, and makes more use of historical abstractions and more complicated ideas.