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Free classroom activities

Your class drafts the teams.
The season explains itself.

Every student runs a franchise. They pick their roster, watch a simulated season play out, and spend the term answering the question that makes the whole thing work: why is one player worth more than another?

Start a class league — free, in baseball, basketball or football

Set up your league

Questions, or want a hand with setup? Email guy@pennantchase.com · Read the teacher notes first

Activity 01 · Baseball

The Value Draft

Batting average is the stat everybody knows. It's also the one that predicts the least. Students find out which numbers actually move the standings.

Open the activity → Activity 02 · Basketball

The 240-Minute Problem

Five players, forty-eight minutes, one basketball. Every roster decision is a decision about who doesn't get the shot.

Open the activity → Activity 03 · Football

What a Pick Costs

Twenty-two starters, one ball, and wildly unequal leverage. Students argue positional value with data from their own league.

Open the activity →

How a unit runs

Four moves, then the season does the teaching

Set-up takes one class period. After that the league runs on its own schedule and students check in on their teams.

  1. Step 01

    Create the league

    Pick a sport and start one yourself — it's free. You choose how many teams, which historical players are eligible, and how many games the season runs.

  2. Step 02

    Draft the rosters

    Run a live draft room in class, let students quick-draft on their own time, or have the computer distribute players and assign teams to students.

  3. Step 03

    Track the season

    Students log a handful of numbers for their own team every week or two. That log becomes the data set for everything that follows.

  4. Step 04

    Explain the results

    Which stats predicted wins? Which didn't? And what is the simulation engine doing under the hood to produce any of it?

The activities

One per sport. Pick the one your students already argue about.

Each comes with a printable student handout. All three share the same shape — draft, predict, track, explain — so they can also run back to back across a year.

Activity 01 · Baseball

The Value Draft

Students draft rosters from a pool of historical hitters and pitchers, then test their own drafting theory against a full simulated season.

Best fit
Grades 6–12
Runs for
3–8 weeks
Class time
1 period to launch, then 15–20 min/week
Math
Rates, weighted averages, scatterplots, correlation

What students do

Before the draft, each student writes down a one-sentence drafting philosophy and ranks the three stats they plan to prioritize. That written prediction is the whole experiment — at the end of the season they'll grade it themselves.

Then they draft, the season simulates, and every week or two they record their team's runs scored, runs allowed, and record along with a few team rate stats. By midseason the class has a full data table with a row for every team in the league.

Questions that drive the unit

  • Rank the league's teams by batting average, then by on-base percentage, then by slugging. Which ranking looks most like the actual standings?
  • A player who reaches base 38% of the time and one who hits .310 with a .330 OBP — which one did more for your team, and how would you prove it?
  • Why did the .320 hitter you drafted only bat .270 for you? Is that the engine, bad luck, or both?
  • Two shortstops are on the board and one first baseman. Does position change what a player is worth to you? Should it?
  • Counting stats (home runs, RBI) versus rate stats (OBP, ERA) — which one told you more when you were drafting, and why?

Reading the sim engine

The interesting part isn't the box score, it's the machinery. Ask students to write down what they think has to happen, in order, for the engine to produce one plate appearance. Most classes get to something like: turn each player's stats into a probability, combine the batter's number with the pitcher's, draw a random value, and see where it lands.

That guess is close enough to be useful, and testing it is the fun part. If a hitter's real-life on-base percentage is .350 and the pitcher he's facing allowed .300, is the result in your league closer to .350, .300, or something in between? The sim engine primer walks a class through the arithmetic.

Activity 02 · Basketball

The 240-Minute Problem

A basketball team has exactly 240 player-minutes to hand out per game. Roster building becomes an allocation problem students can actually see.

Best fit
Grades 7–12
Runs for
3–6 weeks
Class time
1 period to launch, then 15–20 min/week
Math
Rate normalization, efficiency ratios, allocation, per-minute reasoning

What students do

Same draft, different constraint. Five players are on the floor for forty-eight minutes, which is 240 minutes to distribute — and only one basketball. A student who drafts four high-volume scorers has bought four players who can't all do what they're good at.

Students set a rotation, then track how their players' per-game numbers change compared to the historical seasons they drafted. The gap between "what this player did" and "what this player did on my team" is the entire lesson.

Questions that drive the unit

  • Your leading scorer averages 24 points on 21 shots. A teammate averages 11 on 7 shots. Who helped you more? Defend it with a number.
  • Compute true shooting percentage for every starter: TS% = PTS ÷ (2 × (FGA + 0.44 × FTA)). Now re-rank your roster. Did the order change?
  • Convert everyone to per-36-minute rates. Which bench player suddenly looks like a starter, and why didn't the raw totals show it?
  • Did drafting a second star make your first star worse? What would that look like in the numbers?
  • Rebounds are a shared resource too. If you draft three elite rebounders, does the team get three times the rebounds?

Reading the sim engine

Basketball makes the engine's logic unusually visible, because possessions are countable. On any given possession, someone has to shoot. Ask students how the engine might choose who. The usual class answer — a weighted lottery, where a player who took 25% of his team's shots historically gets picked about 25% of the time — is a genuinely good model, and it immediately explains why five volume scorers can't all keep their averages.

Then: once the shooter is chosen, how does the engine decide make or miss? What would a good defensive team have to do to that number?

Activity 03 · Football

What a Pick Costs

Twenty-two starting jobs, one football, and enormously unequal leverage. Students take a position on positional value and then argue it with their own league's data.

Best fit
Grades 8–12
Runs for
3–6 weeks
Class time
1 period to launch, then 15–20 min/week
Math
Per-attempt rates, expected value, margins, evidence-based argument

What students do

Football rosters force the trade-off out into the open, because you have to fill every position whether you want to or not. Before the draft, each student commits in writing to a strategy: quarterback first, trenches first, spread the picks around. Then they live with it for a season.

Weekly tracking is short — points for, points against, yards per pass attempt, yards per carry, turnover margin. Five numbers, ten seconds. The payoff is a league-wide table at the end.

Questions that drive the unit

  • Plot every team's total yards against its wins. Now plot yards per attempt against wins. Which one is the better story, and what does the difference mean?
  • Turnover margin versus wins: how strong is that relationship in your league? Is turnover margin a skill, luck, or a mix?
  • Count the plays your quarterback touched the ball. Now count your best receiver's targets. What does that ratio say about where a first pick belongs?
  • Running backs are cheap in most drafts. Was that true in yours? What would have to change for it not to be?
  • The class held 8 first-round picks. Rank them now, at season's end. How many of the original picks would you make again?

Reading the sim engine

Football is the best of the three for showing that a single play is a chain of decisions, not one roll. Have students write the chain out: pick run or pass, pick the ball carrier or target, decide the outcome, decide the yardage, check for a turnover. Each link is its own probability, and each one leans on different stats.

The run-or-pass choice is the one to linger on, because stats alone don't determine it. Down, distance, score, and time remaining all have to be in there somewhere — which is how students discover that a simulation encodes strategy, not just talent.

Cross-sport handout

Inside the sim engine

Students who ask "how does the computer decide?" have wandered into probability, weighted averages, and the law of large numbers without anyone telling them that's what happened.

The primer is a printable handout that walks through the four ideas a simulation needs: turning a statistic into a probability, combining two players' rates into one number, using a random draw to pick an outcome from a probability band, and layering those draws into a complete play. It ends with an unplugged version — a pair of dice and a lookup table — so a class can hand-simulate a half-inning before ever looking at code.

Open the primer

A sample of the arithmetic

A hitter reaches base 35% of the time. The pitcher he's facing allows it 30% of the time. The league average is 32%. What should happen?

P = (A×B ÷ L) ÷ [ (A×B ÷ L) + ((1−A)(1−B) ÷ (1−L)) ]

Students plug in A = .350, B = .300, L = .320 and get about .329 — between the two, pulled toward the better player. Then they check it against their league's real results and find out how close the guess was.

Notes for teachers

Setting up your class

Leagues are free, and you don't need to ask anyone. Set up your own private league in baseball, basketball, or football — you'll pick the number of teams, the player pool, and the season length as you go. You'll need a free account first, and it's worth clicking through the practice league before you build the real one.

If you'd rather have it set up for you, or you get stuck partway through, email guy@pennantchase.com — tell me your sport, roughly how many students, and how many weeks you have.

Student accounts, the easy way

Send a spreadsheet of the logins you'd like created for your students and I'll create the accounts in bulk.

This is worth doing rather than having students sign up themselves. The site blocks repeated sign-ups coming from the same IP address as a spam defense, and a whole class on one school network looks exactly like that.

Before you email: a mail warning

Some school district mail servers block messages from pennantchase.com outright. If you don't hear back, that's usually why — nothing came through on your end.

Two fixes: ask your IT department to allow the domain, or write to me from a personal address so the reply has somewhere to land.

Three ways to run the draft

Quick draft

Each student picks a full roster on their own time, in a few minutes, whenever they can get to it. Best when class periods are short or students have uneven access at home.

Live draft room

Everyone in the room at once, on the clock, picks going around in order. It's the loudest and best day of the unit if you can spare the period.

Computer distributes

The computer hands out the players and you assign each student a team. No draft logistics at all — and it makes a clean control condition if you want students analyzing rosters they didn't choose.

What you can customize

  • Number of teams. Match it to your roster — one team per student, or pair them up as co-general-managers, which cuts the tracking work in half and doubles the arguing.
  • Which historical players are eligible. Restrict the pool to a single decade, a single era, or open it to everyone. A narrow pool makes the draft tighter and the comparisons cleaner; a wide one is more fun.
  • Games in a season. This is the setting to think about first. Pick a season length that finishes with time left for the analysis, not one that's still running during finals week.

How much do students need to know about sports?

Less than you'd think, and the activities are written so a student who has never watched a game can still do the analysis. Knowing the sport helps with the draft; it doesn't help much with the math, which is where the grading happens.

What if a student loses badly?

That's the good outcome, academically. A last-place team with a written pre-draft prediction is a better piece of evidence than a first-place team with none. Grade the reasoning, not the standings.

Can I use this without any class time for the draft?

Yes — computer distribution plus assigned teams skips the draft entirely, and quick drafts can be done from home.

Do I need to know how the simulation works to teach it?

No. "I don't know, how could we find out?" is the correct answer to almost every question in the sim-engine section, and the primer gives you the tools to actually go find out with them.