Hi, I’m Pascual.
Creator, GAMEONICS · Co-Founder, LearnForge · Former AP Mathematics, AP Calculus & AP Economics Teacher, Taos High School · Former Mayor, Town of Taos (2022–2025) · Former Member, Taos Municipal School Board (2020–2024) · Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, 2023 · Taos, New Mexico
Pascual Maestas grew up all over the world, but Taos, New Mexico has always been home. He carries deep, generational roots in the community he has spent his adult life building toward. That combination, the worldly perspective and the local commitment, is what makes him the kind of educator and leader who does not just talk about change but designs it from the inside out.
After graduating from Taos High School, Pascual joined the US Navy, reaching the rank of Yeoman Petty Officer Third Class before an honorable discharge. He went on to earn dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and international studies from the University of South Florida. When he returned to Taos for what was supposed to be a one-year break before graduate school, the community pulled him in and held him there. He had found where his work needed to happen.
Teaching was in his blood. His grandfather was a well-known Spanish teacher. An aunt was a teacher too. So when Pascual moved through work in the nonprofit sector and Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, teaching life skills through service learning, the path toward the classroom was already written. He became a teacher at Taos High School, where he taught AP Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Economics, three disciplines that sit at the intersection of rigor, real-world application, and the kind of thinking that prepares young people to navigate a complex world. He later completed a master’s degree in economics through New Mexico State University, becoming the first graduate of their online program.
What if students did not just study economic policy? What if they made it?
That question is where GAMEONICS was born. In 2017, Pascual built a classroom simulation for his AP Economics students because he believed they deserved more than a textbook. He wanted them to feel the double coincidence of wants problem before they ever read about it. He wanted them to understand why money exists because they had just lived through a world without it. He wanted the student who out-traded and out-strategized every classmate across an entire semester to earn something real. So he created the Exemption: whoever held the most currency at the end of the semester was exempt from the final exam. That mechanic, proven in a real Taos classroom, is the heartbeat of everything EconQuest is being built to do.
Pascual’s commitment to young people has never been confined to the classroom. He served as the youngest member elected to the Town of Taos Council from 2018 to 2022, was elected to the Taos Municipal School Board from 2020 to 2024, and was elected as the youngest Mayor in Town of Taos history, serving from 2022 through December 2025. He ran because he saw what brain drain was doing to his community, stores closing, economic stagnation, young people leaving and not coming back, and he believed a government that worked for its people was the beginning of the answer. In 2023, he was named an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, joining a national community of values-driven leaders advancing family economic mobility and well-being.
Every chapter of Pascual’s life points in the same direction: toward the young people of Taos and toward the systems that either open doors for them or quietly close them. His fluency in AP Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Economics is not just academic credential. It is the intellectual current running through EconQuest’s entire ecosystem. The game mechanics, the economic logic, the progression from a barter economy to a currency-based market, all of it is grounded in the real pedagogical precision of a teacher who has stood in front of rooms full of students and made these concepts land.
The best-case scenario is a government, and a community, that actually works for its people.
Now, with his mayoral chapter complete, Pascual is channeling that same energy into what comes next. EconQuest is the evolution of his original vision, built for two markets at once, the AP classroom where it was born and the wider world that needs it just as much. Through LearnForge, the company he and Luckie Daniels co-founded, the work that started in a Taos classroom in 2017 is becoming a platform that can reach students, communities, and curious minds everywhere.
The economy is not a subject. It is the system every person on earth lives inside. Pascual has spent his career making sure young people know how to navigate it.
Pascual Maestas is the Creator of GAMEONICS and co-founder of LearnForge. EconQuest is the evolution of GAMEONICS, the original classroom economics simulation he created at Taos High School in 2017. Luckie Daniels serves as EconQuest Architect and Developer under Daniels Family Incubator. EconQuest is currently in Sprint 0 development.