Market Rewind for teachers · Free · No student accounts
Stock market crash simulations for students
Market Rewind puts students inside a real stretch of market history with $10,000 in pretend money. They see only the news of each day, decide how much to keep in stocks, then see what happened next and how their choices compare with doing nothing.
Each stock market lesson plan fits one class period, and comes with a printable worksheet and answer key.
Lessons by episode
1987–19896 min to playBlack Monday 1987
The S&P 500 fell 20% in one day. Decide what you would have done.
Background reading: Black Monday 1987: causes, crash and recovery timeline
- Grade
- Grades 9 to 12 (ages 14 to 18)
- Time
- 30 minutes, one class period
- Fits
- Economics, Personal finance, US History: the 1980s
The link opens the game. Paste it into Canvas, Schoology or your class page.
More episodes, no lesson plan yet
Each game page has the full story and its sources.
- Panic of 1907 · 1905–1909 · 7 min
- 1929 stock market crash · 1929–1954 · 7 min
- Dot-Com Bubble · 1996–2002 · 6 min
How to run it in one period
- Play it once yourself before class. "Skip to the end" shows the result screen students will see.
- Print the student worksheet, or share the game with Google Classroom or your LMS using the buttons above. In class, "Show QR code" lets students open the game with a phone or tablet camera.
- Students play on their own devices and answer the worksheet questions when the game stops at each moment. With one screen, project the game and let the class vote at each stop.
- Finish with the discussion questions and the exit ticket in the lesson plan.
Privacy for schools
Students play without an account, a name or an email address. Here is what the game collects and where it goes.
- Nothing typed in. There is no sign-up step, no name field and no chat. Every choice is a tap or a click.
- Kept on the student's device. The run in progress, so a refresh does not lose it, deleted when it finishes or after 14 days. A count of plays, and a record of the eras played with the best score in each. A finished run also waits there for 7 days in case the player signs in to save it. None of this is sent to us unless the player signs in.
- Usage counts. Google Analytics records the pages viewed, the page a visitor came from, and how the game is played: each choice of how much pretend money stays in stocks, the moment reached, the final score, and which buttons and links were used. It sets its own cookies to recognize a returning browser. Google signals is off, so visits are not tied to anyone's Google account. Vercel, our host, counts page views and measures page speed without cookies. As with any website, Google and Vercel also receive each visitor's IP address, browser and rough location.
- One cookie of our own, without an account. It records the page a visitor first landed on, any campaign tags, and the referring site's address without its page, so the cookie keeps no class or course ID from a school system. It expires after 30 days and is used only if the visitor creates an account. Signing in adds the cookies an account needs.
- What we never do. Game pages carry no ads or affiliate links. We do not sell, trade or rent personal information. StockCram is not a broker and sells nothing to students.
- Accounts are optional. They are for people aged 16 and over who want to keep their results across devices. Students do not need one to play.
- Questions from a school or district. Email support@stockcram.com. More in our children's privacy statement and privacy policy.
If the game is blocked at your school
Some school filters block sites they have not seen before. Your IT team can allow stockcram.com and images.stockcram.com; the game needs no video site, plugin or download. If that does not work, tell us which filter your school uses.
Questions from teachers
Is Market Rewind free for schools?
Yes. The game, the lesson plans and the worksheets are free for classroom use. Game pages carry no ads or affiliate links, and there is nothing to buy.
Do students need an account or an email address?
No. Students open the link and play. The game asks for no names or email, and without an account a student's runs are not saved on our servers.
What grades and classes is it for?
The lesson plans are written for grades 9 to 12 (ages 14 to 18), for economics, personal finance and history classes. Each lesson fits one class period.
Does it teach students to trade?
No. It is a history lesson with pretend money. It shows how the choices a student made would have played out during one stretch of history. It gives no rule for when to buy or sell. Past performance does not indicate future results.
The lesson plans and worksheets are CC BY-NC 4.0: free to copy and share with credit to StockCram (stockcram.com), not for sale. Used a lesson in class, or want one for another unit? Tell us how it went.
Educational simulation only. Historical data is shown for teaching purposes; past performance does not indicate future results. StockCram is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or financial institution.