Professor Game Podcast

Chuck Sigmund is a senior program manager in the Amazon Leadership Institute. Chuck is passionate about creating environments that bring out the best in learners and encourage them to fully engage and optimize their learning experience. His recent work has focused on how to use gamification, digital storytelling, and hyper-interactive scenarios to increase learner engagement. He holds a master of arts in education and training, and is a Sententia Games certified Gamification Master Craftsman.

Dr. Oscar García Pañella, Telecommunications and Electronic Engineer, has enjoyed several stages abroad (IMSC (USC, LA, CA, USA, 1998); VIS Lab (The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, UCI, 2005) and at the ETC (CMU, 2008-2009)). Oscar directs the "Videogame School" ENTI-UB and he also partners as a senior Gamification consultant in Cookie Box. He also directs an online masters on Gamification and Transmedia Storytelling at IEBS.

Adam has worked as a game designer and game consultant for educational and serious games all around in Scandinavia. He has wrote the first, and as for today, the only book in Swedish about Gamification. Today Adam is a Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at the University of Skövde. He also works as a gamification designer and evangelist at the Swedish gamification studio Insert Coin.

Jamie Madigan, Ph.D., has become an expert on the psychology of video games and seeks to popularize understanding of how psychology can be used to understand why games are made how they are and why their players behave as they do. Madigan also writes, podcasts, and lectures on the subject for various magazines, websites, and his own site at www.psychologyofgames.com. He has consulted with game development companies and talked at conferences about how game developers can incorporate psychology principles into game design and how players can understand how it affects their play.

Glen Irvin has been in education around 20 years and he currently works as an instructional coach in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. Glen was previously a Spanish teacher. Glen is well known by the Schoology community as a Gamification expert, Schoology Ambassador, and he was the 2016-2017 Schoology Educator of the Year. He is an avid gamer with a passion for gamification, playful learning and game-based learning. As a teacher, his classroom was a gamified, quest-based, mastery learning environment where students were given the time and opportunity to succeed.

Steve Isaacs is an educator with over 25 years of experience. A teacher at Bernards Township Public Schools in New Jersey, he is an EdTech influencer, community builder, and leader in the area of game-based learning and teaching Game Design and Development. Steve has been part of a wide scale research study on VR in the classroom with foundry10, a research organization in Seattle. He has also been actively involved with the XR4C community as am XR4C ambassador. Steve was honored as the ISTE Outstanding Educator in 2016. In addition to teaching, Steve is the lead content producer for Minefaire, a massive Minecraft fan experience and co-founder of #EdTechBridge, a weekly Twitter chat (Second Wednesday of each month at 7 pm ET) and community working to build collaborative relationships among EdTech stakeholders to create better EdTech for students. More recently, Steve has become passionate about #esports in schools and founded the #esportsedu twitter chat (Thursday nights at 7:30 pm ET) and #esportsedu discord server

Pau has a degree in pedagogy and master in ITC applied to education. Pau is an entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in the creation of digital businesses related to video games, serious games, gamification and mobile technologies. Among others, the businesses he has created are City Nostra, a geolocation video game set in the Sicilian Mafia; Geomotion Games, a consulting and R+D+i company in Gamification for Smart Cities; and PlayVisit, a startup based in Barcelona reinventing tourism and cultural heritage through location-based games and gamification. Pau is a big fan of strategy and resource management video games but also real-life video games that makes you go out and discover the world. He also loves to travel to discover new cities and countries, as well as to practice outdoor sports such as trail running or trekking.

Steve is CEO of Pug Interactive, a technology & design leader in engagement, retention, and community activation. He has 17+ years of direct experience in the video game industry, having designed and produced several AAA games for Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts, Sega and Ubisoft that have generated sales in excess of $650 million. He is frequently sought as a speaker, having spoken at Game Developer's Conference, South by Southwest, SIGGRAPH, Banff New Media Festival, GameON Finance, nextMEDIA and several others. He recently enjoyed an amazing Lebanese dinner with an actual Canadian Astronaut.

Mun Choong (Munch) Munch is a serial tech entrepreneur based in Singapore. He is intrigued by how technology is fundamentally transforming how we socialize, learn, lead, work and play. He is the Founder and CEO of Selfdrvn Enterprise (Selfdrvn), a SaaS solution provider to help organizations improve workforce engagement and performance with positive psychology powered by mobile, AI, analytics and gamification. Munch was a part of the Gamification Panel at Gamification Europe 2018, which you can hear or see on Episode 64.

Dr. Philipp Busch works for GIZ since October 2014. He obtained a Masters' degree in Economics and Geography at the University of Mainz, then continued studying to do his second Masters' degree in Information Systems and Business Administration. In spring 2018 he finished his doctoral thesis about "Gameful Approaches in Development Cooperation", now teaches Gamification and Agile Methods at the University of Mainz. Philipp works at GIZ for the Social Innovation Team in Cairo to improve the situation for youths on the labor market in Egypt. Furthermore, Philipp is head of the GIZ component "Serious Games" to support the peace process in Yemen.