“Who am I? I’m one of the people that can see the future well before it’s created.”
Meet Taylor Shead, the athlete-turned tech entrepreneur who is on a mission to change the way students access and absorb education in the 21st century.
A former college basketball scholar, her original goal was to train as a reconstructive plastic surgeon alongside her sporting career.
But like many students, while sports held her attention, she found STEM subjects inaccessible due to the dense language of mathematical equations and chemical symbols.
“Frankly, I was a little annoyed,” Shead explains. “I was in the best private schools in Texas, and I thought: if I’m in this privileged position where I’m going to college level and I don’t feel prepared, then what about everybody else from all kinds of backgrounds?
“As an athlete, you have tutors [to help you succeed academically] and so I had a moment when I realised that the education system isn’t working.”
The statistics back up her hypothesis. In the US, approximately 86% of kids graduate from high school, but only about 37% of them graduate from college. Only 66% of US students reach Level 2 proficiency in mathematics and fewer than 30% of high school students feel prepared to pursue a postsecondary pathway.
“It was like, this isn’t a problem that’s black or white, it’s not male or female, it’s not rich or poor. This is a problem that impacts everybody,” says Shead.
“There’s a problem with the current system, the way schooling and college prepares you for each next step, even when it’s the best of the best – so what’s the solution?”
Building on a three-year stint as an Apple mentor and volunteering in inner city schools in Dallas and Fort Worth, Shead took the leap and founded Stemuli in 2016 as a platform to support kids in STEM subjects.
Shortly after, the pandemic hit and the world pivoted to online learning. The moment catapulted the business forward and Shead became only the 94th black woman in the history of the world to raise over a million dollars in venture capital.
The company raised over USD$10 million overall and won the prestigious United Nations AI for good competition in 2024.
The Stemuli mission is to gamify the curriculum to engage a generation of learners who have grown up on video games. This isn’t online learning for the sake of it; the aim is to create learning opportunities in the co-creative worlds that exist in games.
“There are 3.3 billion gamers around the world playing right now,” Shead explains. “Yet all the kids I meet in classrooms are bored. Games like Roblox and Minecraft have set the example of STEM learning crossing over to where kids want to be.”
Stemuli is currently beta testing the third iteration of the platform, a one-world gaming environment where there are infinite possibilities to explore and learn.
Only 66% of US students reach Level 2 proficiency in math and fewer than 30% of high school students feel prepared to pursue a postsecondary pathway
“We used to produce a lot of work simulation games but now nobody knows what the future jobs are going to be. Technology is moving so fast,” explains Shead.
“So we’ve created a much more entrepreneurial gaming experience where, together with an AI prompt assistant, you can test and learn all sorts of ideas in a safe environment. We’ve created a game for entrepreneurship.”
Shead is keen to stress that there is a misconception that entrepreneurship means that you must aspire to be the boss of your own company. She equates entrepreneurship to a curiosity skillset that builds problem solving and resilience in a fast-changing world.
“We are a Walton family funded organisation and they partnered with us at Stemuli to scale stimuli across 20 states in the heartland in order to make sure people in rural America have access to AI literacy skills through our video game,” she says.
“I am obsessed about the idea of a little boy or girl sitting in a rural, remote town that’s seeing with their own eyes the problems that need to be solved in their community. They’re going to create the best technology because they understand the problem, whereas somebody on the coast or Silicon Valley, they’re not even thinking about it.”
It is also is significant that Shead has achieved so much success in the edtech field, despite coming largely from an athletic background rather than a tech education.
“Most people think athletes are dumb, but maybe we’re stubborn and hardworking and relentless enough to be the ones that actually can endure the pressure to make something like this happen, right?
“I like to flip the narrative on its head to say it might take an athlete to go up against established systems and to believe that, in a world that is so structured, that education can actually change for the better. They don’t call athletes game-changers for nothing.”
There will be many people who feel the status quo in education should be preserved, but the great promise of technology is the potential for companies like Stemuli to open access up for the majority rather than the privileged few.
“It’s going to be hard, but there are people like me out there who feel inspired by this mission and that means it’s the best time to be alive” says Shead.
Having seen Shead in action at The PIE Live Asia Pacific, we are inclined to believe her.
Talor Shead was interviewed by The PIE’s Nicholas Cuthbert and took part in our conference debate – Will AI improve or damage higher education? at The PIE Live Asia Pacific. Watch Taylor explain why it’s the best time to be alive below.
