Heartland Forward’s partnership with Dallas-based ed-tech company Stemuli started with a simple but compelling idea: If video games can keep millions of American teens engaged for hours each day, they could be harnessed to deliver workforce-relevant AI literacy education across rural communities. The result is Founder Tycoon, an AI-powered learning platform, that gives students the chance to be entrepreneurs in a world where every decision requires applying real AI skills—including prompting, evaluating outputs, identifying where AI falls short and using it as a genuine thinking partner.

In May of 2025, Heartland Forward’s polling on AI and Gen Z found that only 10% of students said their teachers have helped prepare them to use AI in future jobs or education. The following spring, the Founder Tycoon pilot was deployed across 13 rural Arkansas high schools through rootEd Arkansas, Heartland Forward’s public-private initiative to ensure rural high school students graduate on a path to career success and economic mobility—which today requires the skills to compete in an AI-driven economy. Thirty rootEd students were even given the opportunity to join the Stemuli team as paid interns to help co-develop and test the game alongside engineers before it launched in their schools.

While participation was not required, nearly 850 students spent on average 3 hours per week engaged with the platform—roughly the equivalent of an elective class. This demonstrates a level of sustained, self-directed engagement that lends weight to what the data ultimately showed:

• Students’ preparedness to use AI in school or a career rose 28 percentage points. 
• 54% of students reported that they felt curious about AI after playing the game, compared to just 5% beforehand—the largest single affective change recorded in the data. 
• 88% of students reported a positive shift in how they think about their future.
• 81% said the game changed how they think about the types of careers they might pursue. 

But perhaps the most telling results came from qualitative descriptions from students on how they had used the AI skills they learned in Founder Tycoon outside the game. Seventy-six percent of students offered substantive, specific examples rooted in the their specific circumstances, ambitions and communities:

• Dover High School Student, graduating class size of 68: “Founder Tycoon gave foundation to my idea and now I’m legitimately trying to make my idea into a real-life business.”
• Charleston High School Student, graduating class size of 79: “I used AI to gain advice in welding. I learned information that is not easily attainable to complete complex or unordinary tasks.”
• Marshall High School Student, graduating class size of 51: “It helped me when I was looking into colleges with decision making and weighing my options on living, expenses, people, and the best college for me.”
• Magazine High School Student, graduating class size of 31: “I had serious plans about starting a business. After playing and realizing how much great feedback you can get from AI for a business, I used it to get the basic structure and idea of my business if I ever decide to follow through with it.”
• Dover High School Student: “I used it to help create ideas to build an interior design business. It helped me understand how to build and cooperate with AI. I used it to help me better understand what interior designers do and how to do what they do.”

Even students who became more uncertain about their career direction after playing the game simultaneously reported stronger career curiosity, a more positive outlook on their future and concrete examples of applying AI in their daily lives, suggesting that for many, the program expanded their sense of possibility rather than diminishing it.

Equipping the next generation of workers and entrepreneurs with the skills to compete in an AI-driven economy is central to Heartland Forward’s mission to advance economic success across the heartland. Founder Tycoon demonstrated that when rural students are given access to engaging, well-designed AI education, they gain not only technical skills, but also the curiosity and confidence to see themselves as creators, entrepreneurs and leaders in an AI-powered future. 

Learn More 

• Polling the Heartland on AI Readiness: Heartland Forward’s survey data on how students and workers across the heartland are preparing for and experiencing AI-driven change. 
• Harnessing AI in the Heartland: Heartland Forward’s efforts to bring leaders and communities together to understand the heartland’s approach to AI and identify practical pathways to position the region for success in the AI-driven economy. 
• rootEd Arkansas: A public-private partnership between Heartland Forward, rootEd Alliance and the Arkansas Department of Education working to ensure every rural high school student graduates on a path to career success and economic stability.
• Founder Tycoon by Stemuli Studios: The AI-native video game where students found a company around something they care about and direct AI agents to run it—developing AI direction as the operating skill of real work, paired with a measurement architecture that makes the learning defensible to schools, districts, and states.