For teachers
Zerotoinvest is free to use in class: no cost, no ads, no account, no tracking. Worksheets may be copied and handed out to students for classroom use.
What Zerotoinvest offers in the classroom
Over 100 lessons on investing and trading, fifteen calculators, a risk-free paper-trading simulator with a 10,000-euro starting balance, and six printable or fillable worksheets — all without registration, ads, or any collection or transmission of student data. The site gives no investment advice; it teaches fundamentals: what ETFs are, how compound interest works, what costs and taxes apply, how to think about risk.
Worksheets cleared for classroom use
The six PDF templates under Free templates — budget check, debt and emergency fund, trading plan, trading journal, broker checklist, and portfolio overview — may be copied and distributed to an entire class. Some of the worksheets are additionally available as fillable PDFs with automatic calculation (totals, savings rate), marked "fillable" on the templates page; automatic calculation works in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader, and in other PDF viewers the fields can still be filled in by hand.
Ready-to-use lesson packs
Every one of the six stages has a complete lesson pack: every lesson in the stage with learning objective, class time, discussion question, and a quiz answer key for prep, bundled with a matching worksheet where one fits — ready to use, no assembly required.
- Stage −1: Taking Stock (8 lessons)
- Stage 0: Fundamentals (24 lessons)
- Stage 1: Practice (17 lessons)
- Stage 2: Risk and Psychology (17 lessons)
- Stage 3: Analysis (20 lessons)
- Stage 4: Advanced (16 lessons)
Blocks by class length
Rough guidelines, depending on the class and how deep the discussion goes:
- 20 minutes: read one lesson, discuss the built-in comprehension check together.
- 45 minutes: 2-3 thematically related lessons (e.g. excerpts from the Taking Stock pack) plus discussion.
- 90 minutes: a whole stage (8-24 lessons, short version) plus a worksheet to close it out.
- Project week: all of Understanding investing, with the paper-trading simulator as a hands-on finish.
A suggested way to use it in class
Lessons are organized into stages from −1 (prerequisites) to 4 and are each built for a 5–10 minute read — suitable as homework or as an opener for a class period. Every lesson ends with a built-in comprehension check (a decision scenario with direct feedback) that also works well as a discussion prompt. For a connected block of lessons, the topic pages under Understanding investing are a good starting point; for a hands-on close, the paper-trading simulator or a matching worksheet.
Recommended age per stage
A rough guide, not a hard cutoff — language and examples get more demanding stage by stage (overdrafts and budgeting at the start, leverage and backtesting at the end):
| Stage | Topic | Recommended from | Education level |
|---|---|---|---|
| −1 | Taking Stock | age 13 | Lower secondary |
| 0 | Fundamentals | age 13 | Lower secondary |
| 1 | Practice | age 14 | Lower secondary |
| 2 | Risk and Psychology | age 15 | Lower secondary, later years |
| 3 | Analysis | age 16 | Upper secondary / vocational |
| 4 | Advanced | age 16 | Upper secondary / vocational |
Education level follows ISCED 2 (lower secondary) and ISCED 3 (upper secondary) as a European reference point — the exact grade varies by country and school type.
Seeing class progress without accounts
The Classroom tool creates a link to one stage that you share with your class — no login, no server, no central overview. Each student works through the assigned stage in their own browser and prints their own report at the end (real understanding checks passed, not just clicked) or saves it as a PDF. You get the reports the same way your class normally works.
Legal and privacy
Zerotoinvest runs entirely in the student's browser. No accounts are created, no form data is sent to a server, and no third-party advertising or analytics scripts are loaded — details are under Privacy. The site does not replace financial advice and gives no buy or sell recommendations, which is the right frame for the classroom too: investing as a subject to understand, not a recommendation to act on.
Feedback from the classroom
Missing a worksheet, a lesson, or an explanation you'd need in class? Feedback from actual classroom use is especially useful because it shows where an explanation is still too abstract.