Notebook Mogul
The game that teaches kids how money actually works — by letting them run a business and learn from what happens.
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The game that teaches kids how money actually works — by letting them run a business and learn from what happens.
A financial literacy game where kids run a business — buying and selling products across neighborhoods, reacting to market events, and learning to read prices. By the time they're done, they understand profit margins, supply and demand, and cash management — not because they were taught, but because they lived it.
Supply and demand, profit margins, risk management, diversification — taught through gameplay, not worksheets.
Kids want to play it again. The financial literacy happens because the game mechanics are financial literacy.
Maps to all six national financial literacy standards. Covers requirements across 41 mandate states.
Classrooms, homeschool families, or just a kid on a tablet. No setup required. No teacher account needed.
Each neighborhood has different prices. Travel smart, buy low, sell high.
A standards-aligned simulation that works in a single class period. 30+ financial concepts with built-in behavioral assessment — no prep required.
Self-contained, self-assessing, and genuinely replayable. End-of-game reports provide portfolio documentation for standardized requirements.
A game they'll actually want to play again. Learn what profit margin means because you just lost money on a bad trade — not because you read it in a textbook.
41 states now require financial literacy for graduation. Teachers need engaging, classroom-ready tools. Notebook Mogul fills that gap.
Notebook Mogul wasn't built by a game studio or an EdTech company. It was built by a dad in his 50s with zero coding experience — using AI as his development partner.
Every mechanic teaches something real. Every event creates a decision. Every playthrough is different. From a lemonade stand to a publicly traded corporation — the full arc of business, learned through play.
Notebook Mogul is still early in development, and the most useful test so far has been having real kids play it. This spring, a few Arizona classrooms across grades 3–5 tried an early version. It was informal — a school administrator that I know coordinated with some teachers at her school to have their classes play it. Here's honestly what came back.
Kids got into it. Many wanted to play again, and a good number came back to it on their own. More telling, they started repeating the ideas in their own words:
A short before-and-after quiz with one class showed modest gains — the group was small, and I'm not going to oversell it — but the clearest improvement was on the concepts kids pick up by playing: spreading out where they sell, not over-buying, and the difference between making sales and making a profit. One teacher summed up her class's reaction simply: they thought it was fun.
It's a work in progress, which is exactly why a few minutes of feedback from your family would genuinely help.
Get updates as Notebook Mogul grows. New tiers, classroom resources, and behind-the-scenes.
Follow the journey on X @notebookmogul