When your PE lesson plan falls apart, this app saves it

8:53am, a Tuesday in week six.

You walk in carrying your Sunday plan in your head. Modified handball. Year 4. Outside, on the back oval, two parallel courts marked out with cones.

You glance at the staffroom whiteboard. The oval's been booked for the senior swim carnival overflow. Then a Year 6 teacher catches your eye and says — sorry mate, I needed the cones for Period 1, didn't think you'd mind.

You don't mind. You're already mentally redrafting.

7 minutes till the bell. Indoor gym only. No cones. 28 kids — except 9 are at swim trials, so maybe 19. You've got bibs, a few foam balls, and the lesson topic still has to land somewhere in the ballpark of "throwing and catching."

Pick the moment. You've had it happen this term.

What's actually broken about PE planning

PE plans don't fail because the teacher didn't prepare. They fail because PE plans depend on five fragile inputs at once:


Space	Booked. Wet. Shared. Locked.
Equipment	Walked off. Locked in the shed. The keys are with someone in a meeting.
Group size	Excursion. Sport. Sick. Carnival. Three new kids you didn't know about.
Time available	Assembly ran long. You have 18 minutes, not 30.
Energy of the class	Just came from a fitness test. Hyped. Or a maths test. Flat.

Every one of those changes the lesson. Any one of them being off by 20% means your plan is wrong. And on a normal week, you get hit with two or three of them at once.

Sunday-night planning assumes a steady world. Tuesday morning is not a steady world.

The two-minute version

I made a video version of this for the people who'd rather watch than read. Same idea, different format:

Why every PE teacher has the same shoebox of games

Watch a staffroom long enough and you'll notice something. Almost every PE teacher works from a personal shoebox of about 8–12 reliable games. Pin Ball. Capture the Flag. End Ball. Builders and Bulldozers. Octopus. Stuck in the Mud. The classics. The ones that work under any pressure.

We rely on the shoebox because new ideas are slow. A single fresh game can take an hour to design — equipment list, rules, rule-edge cases, safety, variations for the kid who can't run, a way to make it harder for the kid who's already winning. That hour doesn't exist when you're standing in the gym at 8:55.

So we go back to the shoebox. Class plays Pin Ball again. Kids notice. We notice they notice. The game still works — but the lesson loses its edge. Over a term you start to feel the rotation.

This is the part I wanted to fix.

What we built

Three tools, in one app, designed for the exact moments planning falls apart.

A library of 250+ teacher-trusted games. Filter by space, equipment, year level, skill. Tap a game, get the full structure: rules, diagram, variations, safety. This is your cold-storage shoebox — bigger than the one in your head, browsable in 30 seconds.

An AI Game Generator. This is the part I'm proudest of. Tell it the four things that matter — year level, equipment you've actually got, the space you're actually in, and the skill or theme you want — and it generates fresh games in 30 seconds, custom to that exact mess. Setup, rules, coaching cues, variations, safety considerations, curriculum links, all in the same format as the library games. Teachable in five minutes.

An AI Lesson Planner. Whole-period structure — warm-up, main, cooldown — with timing, game choices, and a reason for each one. Curriculum-aligned to AU, US, UK, NZ, CA, IB. Thirty seconds, not thirty minutes.

A worked example

Take the 8:53am Tuesday from the start of this post. Plug it into the AI Generator:

Skill: Throwing & Catching
Age group: Year 4 (8–10 years)
Environment: Indoor gym
Equipment: Bibs, foam balls

Hit generate. Roughly 20–30 seconds later you have three new games. Each one comes back with a name, a hook, age fit, duration, players, equipment list, setup instructions, numbered how-to-play steps, four to six coaching cues, an easier and harder variation, safety notes, differentiation guidance, and curriculum links.

You skim the three. One looks right for the energy of the class. You read it once, walk out into the gym, run it.

Lesson saved. The class doesn't know anything went sideways.

Try it without installing anything

I built a free preview at pegames.app/try — fill in the form, sign up with email or Apple or Google, and you get three custom AI-generated games right in your browser. Same engine the iOS app uses. No install, no credit card.

If it earns its keep on a single bad-weather Tuesday, the full app is the next step. If it doesn't, you've still got a printable PDF of three custom games to take with you.

Generate three free games →

Or search PE Games on the App Store / Play Store. Three days free.

— Jarrod