Rapunzl Launches Run The Fed and Rate the Loan, Two Economics Games for the 2026-27 School Year

CHICAGO, July 12, 2026 — Rapunzl, the financial literacy platform used in classrooms across the country, today launched two economics games for the 2026-27 school year. In Run The Fed, students take the Federal Reserve chair's seat and set interest rates. In Rate the Loan, students start at a bank's teller window and work their way up to running the bank. Both games are built into Rapunzl.

Economics is easier to understand when students make the decisions themselves. Interest rates, inflation, unemployment and credit are the concepts that shape a family's budget, and they are hard to feel from a textbook. Each game gives students a decision to make, a consequence to watch and a debrief that explains what happened.

"Students get economics when they have to make the call and live with the result," said Myles Gage, co-founder and co-CEO of Rapunzl. "One game puts them in the chair of the Federal Reserve. The other puts them behind the loan desk. Together they show how a decision about rates reaches a real person and a real bank."

Run The Fed: set the rate, watch the economy answer

Run The Fed puts students in the role of Federal Reserve chair. Each turn is one quarter. Students read the state of the economy, check the gauges for inflation and unemployment, and choose to cut, hold or hike the federal funds rate. Then they commit and see what happens. As in the real economy, the effects of a rate decision take a few quarters to show up, so patience is part of the game.

• Scenarios that build in difficulty. Students start with a sleepy economy and work toward harder problems, including an overheating economy, stagflation and a soft landing.
• Blind history runs. Some scenarios hide their era until the student finishes. Students may find they were steering through Volcker's fight against inflation, the 2008 financial crisis or the pandemic.
• Dual-mandate scoring. Students are scored on the Fed's two goals, stable prices and maximum employment, along with how steady their decisions were and how well they explained them.

Run The Fed takes about 3 hours.

Rate the Loan: approve, deny or price

In Rate the Loan, students are the underwriter. Every application is a person, such as a first-time car buyer, a family hoping for a mortgage or a shop owner who needs inventory. Students weigh credit score, income stability and debt-to-income, then approve, deny or price the loan. Prices have to cover the bank's risk without driving customers away.

As the loan book grows, so does the bank. Students rise through seven ranks, from loan clerk at the teller window to bank president, and the bank itself grows from a single window to a headquarters. Each stage opens new kinds of lending, and a quarterly debrief ties their choices back to concepts like fair pricing, cost of funds, capital cushions and diversification. Rate the Loan takes about 6 hours and works in a personal finance or economics class.

How they fit into Rapunzl

Both games are built into Rapunzl, so students open them from the same account they already use. The two games work as a pair: students set the rate in one, then see how rates reach a lender in the other. Learn more at rapunzl.com.

About Rapunzl

Rapunzl is a financial literacy company that gives students in grades 6–12 a standards-aligned curriculum, a real-time investment simulator and free national scholarship competitions. Founded in Chicago in 2018 by Myles Gage and Brian Curcio, who were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 2024 Education list, Rapunzl was named a 2022 Yass Prize finalist and won the 2022 STOP Award for Transformational Education. Learn more at rapunzl.com.