What Is a Good Tool to Teach the Federal Reserve and Interest Rates?

Last updated: September 2026. Written and fact-checked by Clarissa Collins, Rapunzl editorial team. Every external tool below was checked live and is cited in full in Sources.

The Federal Reserve's own site, Federal Reserve Education, and the St. Louis Fed's FRED database are the two best free starting points for teaching the Fed and interest rates, because both come straight from the source and cost nothing. For a hands-on simulation where students actually set the federal funds rate and watch inflation and unemployment respond, Rapunzl's Run the Fed game (part of its High School Economics course) and the Council for Economic Education's EconEdLink lessons fill the gap those reference tools leave open.

Key Facts at a Glance

• Federal Reserve Education (federalreserveeducation.org) is the Fed system's own free hub for K-12, middle school, high school, and college classrooms, covering inflation, markets, saving, investing, and monetary policy (Federal Reserve Education, 2026).
• FRED, run by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is a free database of over 853,000 economic time series, including the federal funds rate, CPI, and the yield curve. It's the primary source teachers point students at for real numbers, not a lesson plan (FRED, 2026).
• EconEdLink, from the Council for Economic Education, is a free K-12 library with lesson plans, videos, and games on monetary policy specifically, including a hands-on reserves activity called "Monetary Tug-of-War" (EconEdLink, 2026).
• Econ Lowdown, the St. Louis Fed's long-running curriculum brand, now redirects straight to Federal Reserve Education. It has effectively been folded into that site rather than staying a separate destination (verified 2026-09-21).
• "Chair the Fed," the San Francisco Fed's classic rate-setting game, does not appear to still exist as a working link. The teacher activity guide is still archived as a PDF, but the game page itself 404s, and it was built on Flash, which browsers stopped supporting in 2020.
• Rapunzl's Run the Fed puts students in the Fed chair's seat for real: they read a briefing, move the federal funds rate in 25-basis-point steps, and see inflation and unemployment respond a few quarters later, across six scenarios plus three disguised real history runs (Volcker, 2008, the pandemic). It anchors the monetary-policy unit of Rapunzl's High School Economics course (Rapunzl, 2026).
• Rapunzl's /market-data page documents an economic-indicators feature with a dedicated "Rates" category (the fed funds rate, the 10-year Treasury, and the spread between them), alongside 70+ years of inflation and jobs data, linked directly to Run the Fed as a related tool (Rapunzl, 2026).

What's the best free tool to teach the Federal Reserve and interest rates?

For a free option, start with Federal Reserve Education for lessons and FRED for the actual numbers. Both are run by the Fed itself, so nothing gets simplified into a myth. Federal Reserve Education is built for teachers first: it's organized by grade band, and its resources are described on the platform's own homepage as "ready-to-use tools" at no cost, covering "Markets," "Inflation," "Unemployment," and monetary policy (Federal Reserve Education, 2026). Point students at FRED once they need the raw series behind the lesson: the federal funds rate, headline CPI, and the yield curve are all free downloads, live-graphed, going back decades (FRED, 2026).

Those two cover the reading and the data. What they don't do is put a decision in a student's hands. That's the gap EconEdLink and a rate-setting simulation each try to close in different ways.

How do Federal Reserve Education, FRED, and EconEdLink actually compare?

They're not competitors so much as three different jobs: Federal Reserve Education is the classroom reading, FRED is the raw data, and EconEdLink is the activity you actually run that period. Reading a Fed publication and running a hands-on activity are different skills, and most teachers end up combining at least two of these rather than picking just one.

A quick honesty check on that last row: Federal Reserve Education, FRED, and EconEdLink are public-mission resources built to be free, full stop. Rapunzl's Run the Fed is part of its High School Economics course rather than a standalone download, and the trade-off is what a school gets from that course: a game engine, a scored campaign, and a full curriculum unit built around it, instead of a lesson a teacher has to build from scratch.

Is there a hands-on simulation for setting interest rates?

Yes. Rapunzl's Run the Fed is built specifically for this: students read a quarterly briefing, move the federal funds rate in 25-basis-point steps, then watch inflation and unemployment respond a few quarters later, the same lag the real Fed deals with. Six campaign scenarios ramp from "a sleepy economy" up to a stagflation trap where one lever can't fix two problems at once, and three additional runs disguise a real historical crisis until the student finishes it: Volcker's inflation fight, the 2008 freeze, and the 2020-22 whipsaw. Every reveal compares the student's rate path, quarter by quarter, to what the actual Fed did and unlocks a short history lesson on why (Rapunzl, 2026).

That's a meaningfully different exercise than reading about the fed funds rate. A student can memorize that the Fed cuts rates in a recession and raises them to fight inflation; setting the actual rate and watching a soft landing slip away because they moved too fast (or too slow) is what makes the dual mandate feel hard instead of obvious. If your school already runs Rapunzl's curriculum, Run the Fed slots into the monetary-policy unit of the High School Economics course. If it doesn't, EconEdLink's free "Monetary Tug-of-War" activity is a lower-tech way to get at the same tension (reserves, not rates directly, but the same push-and-pull logic) using string and index cards instead of a screen (EconEdLink, 2026).

What happened to the "Chair the Fed" game?

It looks discontinued. "Chair the Fed" was a real interactive built by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and it had a long run: press coverage from The Hill described it as letting "players lead U.S. monetary policy," and college textbooks like Lumen Learning's Introduction to Business still assign it as a simulation exercise. The mechanics, per the Fed's own teacher guide, had students set the fed funds rate over 16 quarters to hit a 2% inflation target and a 5% unemployment target (FRBSF, activity guide).

But the game itself doesn't appear to be reachable anymore. Its expected page at frbsf.org returns a 404, and it was originally a Flash game, a technology every major browser stopped supporting at the end of 2020. The teacher-facing PDF guide is still archived on the Fed's servers, which is why textbooks keep citing it, but there's no indication students can actually play it today. If a colleague mentions "Chair the Fed," it's worth knowing it's a real, well-regarded piece of Fed history rather than something you missed. It's just not a link you can hand your class right now.

A 3-lesson plan: from the fed funds rate to student portfolios

This is the piece the reference sites don't give you: connecting a rate decision to what it actually does to a stock portfolio, which is the part students remember. It assumes access to a simulator (Rapunzl's or otherwise) where students hold real, live-priced positions.

1. Set the stage with real data, not a story. Pull up FRED's federal funds rate and CPI charts and Federal Reserve Education's explainer on the dual mandate. Have students identify the Fed's two jobs (stable prices, maximum employment) and mark on the FRED chart where the Fed cut, held, and hiked over the last five years. This is the "why does the Fed even do this" lesson, grounded in the actual series rather than a textbook summary.
2. Put students in the chair. Run Run the Fed's "Too Hot to Handle" or "Stagflation Station" scenario (or, without Rapunzl access, EconEdLink's "Monetary Tug-of-War"), and have each student or team commit to a rate move each quarter with a one-sentence rationale, the same trade-journal habit that works for a stock-market-game unit. Debrief on how many teams overcorrected, and why patience was the hardest move.
3. Trace the rate into a portfolio. Back in the simulator, have students look at their own holdings (or a shared class portfolio) and pick two or three positions that are typically rate-sensitive: a bank stock, a homebuilder or REIT, and a high-growth tech name that trades on future earnings. Before the next class, have them predict, in writing, whether a hypothetical quarter-point hike would help or hurt each one and why (borrowing costs, mortgage demand, the present value of future profits). Check the predictions against what actually happened to those tickers on live Nasdaq pricing, and talk through anywhere the market didn't do what the theory predicted. That gap is usually the most useful ten minutes of the unit.

How Rapunzl fits into a Fed and interest-rate unit

Rapunzl's Run the Fed isn't a standalone free download, and it's worth saying so upfront. What it adds is the piece Federal Reserve Education, FRED, and EconEdLink don't build for you: a rate-setting game with a scoring engine, tied to a full High School Economics course, sitting next to a real-time investing simulator where the rate decisions a student just made connect to stocks and crypto they're actually holding. Run the Fed anchors the monetary-policy unit of Rapunzl's High School Economics course, and the /market-data page's "Rates" category (the fed funds rate, the 10-year Treasury, and the spread between them) sits inside the same product students use for the simulator, so the data, the game, and the portfolio are one continuous experience rather than three tabs open at once (Rapunzl, 2026). Schools already running Rapunzl's curriculum get Run the Fed as part of it; schools that aren't can still build lesson 3 above with any simulator and the free tools in lessons 1 and 2.

Sources

1. Federal Reserve Education, homepage and resource-library description ("A FREE platform with economics and personal finance resources for classrooms and communities"; grade bands K-5 through college; topics including monetary policy). https://www.federalreserveeducation.org/ (retrieved 2026-09-21, HTTP 200)
2. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED ("Your trusted source for economic data since 1991"; 853,000+ series including the Federal Funds Rate, CPI, and interest-rate series). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ (retrieved 2026-09-21, HTTP 200)
3. Council for Economic Education, EconEdLink ("hundreds of free K-12 personal finance and economics... lesson plans, videos, activities, and games"; "Monetary Tug-of-War: Limited vs. Ample Reserves," grades 9-12). https://www.econedlink.org/ (retrieved 2026-09-21, HTTP 200)
4. St. Louis Fed, Economic Education hub (Econ Lowdown's institutional home; econlowdown.org redirects here). https://www.stlouisfed.org/education (retrieved 2026-09-21, HTTP 200); econlowdown.org redirect confirmed 2026-09-21.
5. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, "Chair the Fed: An Introduction to the Game" (teacher activity guide: 16-quarter rate-setting exercise against 2% inflation / 5% unemployment targets). https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/CTF_Activity_Introduction.pdf (retrieved 2026-09-21, HTTP 200; the game's own page at frbsf.org/education/teacher-resources/chair-the-fed/ returned 404 on the same date)
6. The Hill, "'Chair the Fed' makes monetary policy a video game" (contemporaneous coverage of the FRBSF interactive). https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/296188-fed-game-lets-players-lead-us-monetary-policy/ (retrieved 2026-09-21)
7. Rapunzl (first-party product facts: Run the Fed's scenario rail, scoring, and course placement; /market-data's economic-indicators "Rates" category and its link to Run the Fed). https://rapunzl.com/run-the-fed and https://rapunzl.com/market-data (retrieved 2026-09-21, HTTP 200)

Related reading: Financial Literacy Curriculum With a Stock Market Simulator · Teaching Dollar-Cost Averaging With a "What If You Had Invested" Simulator · How to Compare Stock Performance With Students

See it in the classroom: Run the Fed · Market Data & Economic Indicators · Rapunzl Simulator · Curriculum

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