It was love at first lesson plan. As a first-year teacher tasked with leading AP Economics at Newark High School in 2002, Scott Bacon, BE11M, turned to UD’s Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship for help.

“I became a groupie and came to just about everything they offered,” says Bacon, now assistant director for the center (pronounced C Triple E), which annually provides roughly 2,000 in-state teachers with peer networking opportunities and high-quality, grade-appropriate professional development in economics and personal finance.

With hundreds of free, pedagogically sound, standards-based lessons, resources and instructional materials, CEEE helps teachers across Delaware’s 19 public school districts, charters and private schools infuse their classrooms with hands-on content.

That could mean a free-market simulation in which middle schoolers buy and sell chocolate, determining the price not through a monopoly or a teacher’s discretion but through the trial-and-error of negotiation.

Another popular lesson is the collusion game: Four teams choose between X and Y. If all four play X, nobody makes money. They have four rounds to make their choice, and in the third, representatives meet in the hallway and “collude.” They make deals, shake hands—and quickly realize they can make money by cheating.

“I’ve never had a winning team,” says Bacon, who spent 13 years as a Delaware educator before joining CEEE in 2015. “There’s yelling and screaming, but a lot of fun.”

In the end, students have learned about oligopolistic markets like OPEC, in which countries often produce more oil than they agreed to. But if they all produce more, then supply increases, price decreases, and all teams lose.

“Economics is a way of looking at the world and understanding that people make choices based on incentives,” says Bacon. “It applies to everything—corporations, institutions, individuals.”

The incentive to continue CEEE’s 53-year statewide mission to provide exceptional professional development for teachers and engaging programs and lesson plans for students is an easy one. It can be found in the macro data of the past year alone: 164 trainings for 2,397 teachers, reaching 241,118 students. But ask Bacon, and the real joy exists in the micro.

“Did an individual student in some teacher’s classroom learn something they didn’t know before? Did the lightbulb go off for one kid who was bored or didn’t understand? When you see these former students coming to UD and studying business, finance, economics, there’s nothing more rewarding.”