Make the room worth being in
You are competing with a recording of yourself, and the recording can be watched at 1.5x with the boring parts skipped. The only thing it cannot reproduce is the other eighty-nine people, so that is the thing to build the session around.
Thirty of ninety in the room, and half of those on a laptop doing something for another course. The content is fine. The format is what lost.
Project a code and the room is in
No accounts to hand out at the door and no app to install. They join on the phone already in their hand, and the standings go up on the projector.
The projector view is built for a lecture theatre rather than a laptop: large type, live standings, and a round timer legible from the back row.
Two formats, doing two different jobs
Fifteen minutes you can drop anywhere
Praxis Play formats fit inside a session. Good as a warm-up, as an exam recap, or for the moment you realise half the room did not do the reading and pressing on would be pointless.
A thread that runs all term
In Praxis Sim, teams run a firm over multiple rounds against live competitors on price, advertising, quality and distribution. It gives the course a spine students argue about outside class, which is the rarest thing on this page.
Neither one costs you admin
Participation and results record against the course automatically, so an engaging session still counts toward something and you are not reconciling it from a paper list afterwards.
What you would be running
⚠️ The fair objection
"Live activities are exactly the thing that fails in front of a class."
Which is why the failure modes matter more than the feature list. Joining is a room code in a phone browser, so there is no app store queue eating the first ten minutes. Late arrivals can join a round already in progress. If the podium machine has a bad afternoon, the game state is on the server rather than in your browser tab. Run one fifteen-minute session before you build a whole class period on it — that is the honest way to find out whether it works in your room.