First-hand accounts from 15 schools across Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. What teachers observed when The Kidpreneur came to their classrooms.
The following testimonials were gathered through structured feedback surveys and follow-up interviews with teachers who facilitated The Kidpreneur pilot sessions in their schools. All teachers gave written consent for their accounts to be shared. First names and school identifiers are used to protect individual privacy.
When Amanuel first introduced The Kidpreneur to our school, I was honestly sceptical. Students in Grade 9 are difficult to engage — especially for business concepts that feel abstract to them. Most of the time, entrepreneurship education becomes a lecture about theories they cannot connect to their daily lives.
What I observed during the pilot was completely different. From the very first session, students were leaning forward, debating with their neighbours about the best strategy. One student, Bereket, failed his virtual business four times. Instead of getting frustrated and quitting, he asked me if he could try again during lunch. I had to call him out of the lab when the next class arrived.
The AI feedback was particularly impressive. When students made a poor pricing decision, the platform explained why it went wrong in plain language they understood. This is what I try to do as a teacher — but the immediate, personalised feedback from the AI created learning moments I simply cannot replicate for 28 students simultaneously.
Six weeks after our sessions ended, I still hear students referencing the simulation scenarios in casual conversation. I would recommend The Kidpreneur to every business teacher in Ethiopia.
My class includes several students who are generally disengaged from school. Two of them — I will call them A and B — rarely complete assignments and almost never participate in discussions. I was prepared for them to be disruptive during the simulation sessions.
What happened instead surprised me. Both became intensely focused from the first session. A in particular became a kind of informal coach for his classmates — he had figured out a pricing strategy that worked, and other students were coming to him for advice. The dynamic in my classroom completely reversed.
This platform reaches students through competition and play in a way that traditional instruction does not. The business scenarios felt real to my students — they referenced things they see in Mercato and Bole Road. That relevance made the difference.
I have requested that The Kidpreneur be included in our school's technology plan for 2026. My school director has approved exploratory discussions with the founder.
I facilitated The Kidpreneur sessions in our computer lab, which does not have reliable internet. I was concerned that the AI component would fail mid-session. It never did — the offline installation ran without a single interruption across all five of our sessions.
From an educational standpoint, the progression of difficulty impressed me. Students in Grade 10 who completed the Junior High scenarios moved to High School mode naturally, and the increased complexity was challenging but not discouraging. The platform calibrated itself to their level in a way that kept them in the learning zone.
I observed students making genuinely sophisticated business reasoning by their third simulation — discussing opportunity cost, market positioning, and risk management without using those exact terms, but understanding the concepts intuitively. That is effective education.
The unexpected benefit for me as a mathematics teacher was cross-subject transfer. After students ran their virtual businesses and encountered money calculations, they came to my regular mathematics lessons with specific questions: "Teacher, how do you calculate the exact percentage of profit?" or "If I sell 50 items at 40 Birr but my cost was 25 Birr per item, what is my total profit?"
These are real mathematical thinking patterns emerging from a game. Grade 7 students doing applied profit and loss calculations voluntarily — that is remarkable. I have started incorporating The Kidpreneur as a reward activity after mathematics units on percentages and ratios. The contextual application is more powerful than any textbook exercise I could design.
The mindset shift I observed was the most significant outcome of The Kidpreneur pilot. In our community, there is a deep cultural belief that entrepreneurship is for people who already have money or connections. Students internalise this before they even enter secondary school.
After three or four simulation runs, I noticed students beginning to question this narrative themselves — not because I told them to, but because they had experienced firsthand that smart decisions, not starting capital, determined their success in the game. That is a powerful message delivered through experience rather than instruction.
I believe The Kidpreneur should be integrated into the national civics and entrepreneurship curriculum. The platform is already culturally relevant, age-appropriate, and practically tested. It is ready for wide deployment.
As an English teacher, I was initially unsure how a business simulation was relevant to my subject. But language acquisition through meaningful context is one of the most evidence-based approaches in language education — and The Kidpreneur provided exactly that.
Students encountered terms like "profit margin," "market competition," "supplier," and "customer retention" in a context where they needed to understand them to succeed. By the third session, they were using this vocabulary naturally in their English writing assignments. I have never seen vocabulary transfer happen that quickly or sustainably.
Analysis of all 15 teacher feedback surveys and follow-up interviews identified the following consistent themes, present in responses from 12 or more schools:
13 of 15 teachers rated student engagement higher than their typical business or economics class. Average engagement score: 4.3 out of 5.
Teachers noted that the immediate, specific AI feedback resolved confusion points that would normally require individual teacher attention for each student.
Ethiopian market scenarios, local currency, and familiar business contexts were consistently cited as critical engagement factors by both teachers and students.
12 of 15 teachers reported students voluntarily discussing business concepts from the simulation in other contexts — other classes, breaks, or at home.
In 11 schools, teachers observed students organically coaching each other without prompting — sharing strategies, explaining concepts, and celebrating each other's wins.
The most consistently cited qualitative outcome: students explicitly reconsidering entrepreneurship as a realistic option for their own future — across all 15 schools.