Professor Game Podcast

Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation, and Pedagogy at the University of Northern Colorado. His research is at the intersection of teacher education, learning technologies, and game-based learning. Dr. Farber has been invited to the White House, to twice keynote for UNESCO, and he has been interviewed about games and learning by NPR, Fox News Radio, The Denver Post, USA TODAY and The Wall Street Journal. He is an Edutopia blogger, a Certified BrainPOP Educator, and he is in the iCivics Educator Network. With Karen Schrier, Ed.D., he co-authored the UNESCO MGIEP working paper, The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as "Empathy Machines". Dr. Farber's book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning — Revised Edition (Peter Lang, 2017) features a foreword from Greg Toppo. He is the also co-editor of Game Jam Guide (Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, 2017). His latest book, Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games (Peter Lang, 2018), has a foreword from James Paul Gee.

This is a special episode, instead of a regular interview you will have access to the audio version of the panel I moderated during Gamification Europe 2018 in Amsterdam, featuring Juliette Denny, Munch Lam and Will Stuart-Jones. Juliette Denny is the managing director of Growth Engineering which is a company that helps the corporate world make their learning a lot more engaging. They set up the learning infrastructure for large and small companies alike so their employees actually love to learn. Will works for 3radical that is a SaaS company that provides gamification software coming from a marketing background. Munch Lam founded SelfDrvn in Singapore and they are a gamification platform company that started in 2015 building their customer base especially in Asia.

Keith Ng (@keizng) co-founded Gametize (with his best friend Damon Widjaja, and later Brenda Nicole Tan), a digital gamification platform to motivate behaviors through challenges and rewards such as in recruitment, learning & development, marketing and community advocacy. Gametize won funding in a reality TV show (Angels' gate), the People's Vote in IBM's Asean Smartcamp 2013, and most recently SBR's 2015 20 hottest startups in Singapore. The platform is powering fun for over 300,000 users with 10 million challenge completions. Keith was nominated as one of the most influential people in gamification globally by Gamification Summit (2014), as well as the top 100 gamification innovator/consultant by Sparkah.

This is a special episode, instead of a regular interview you will have access to the audio version of the panel I moderated during Gamification Europe 2018 in Amsterdam, featuring Juliette Denny, Munch Lam and Will Stuart-Jones. Juliette Denny is the managing director of Growth Engineering which is a company that helps the corporate world make their learning a lot more engaging. They set up the learning infrastructure for large and small companies alike so their employees actually love to learn. Will works for 3radical that is a SaaS company that provides gamification software coming from a marketing background. Munch Lam founded SelfDrvn in Singapore and they are a gamification platform company that started in 2015 building their customer base especially in Asia.

A passionate and dedicated teacher who has taught K-12 Phys Ed as well as Grade 7 & 8 Sciences for the past 9 years. His professional motto is "Would you want to be in your classroom?" and it is reflected in his daily teaching. Deeply passionate about engagement, student connection and relationships in the classroom and believes that when connected together properly, you can pique interest in all students. He also believes in innovation in the classroom where he is constantly challenging himself to put new practices into play - especially the concept of "Gamification". Was a recipient of the 2013 Alberta Excellence in Teaching Award and the 2015 Gamification of Education Project of the Year. He has also been fortunate enough to share his ideas with 2 different TEDx groups, most recently with the University of Alberta and was Alumni of the Year in 2017 for Human Kinetics at Laurentian University.

Keith is the founder of Lillico learning Solutions which works with clients to build training that is accessible to all learners including those who have disabilities. He draws from his formal education and experience in instructional design as well as business to create learning content that focuses on meeting the needs of the learner while aligning it with enterprise-wide business objectives. He is a self-proclaimed brain learning junkie who believes anyone can learn anything they want as quickly as they want. He is currently working on developing a modern repeatable learning model that will allow learners to acquire and retain information at a rate that is much faster than traditional methods.

Jan Bidner is as a gamification designer and UX strategist and has worked as a consultant in the IT Industry for over 15 years. He has been an advocate for storytelling, game design thinking and user-centered design even longer. With a background in acting and teaching drama, he always brings a bit of playfulness into everything he does. Lately, he has been working a lot with the digital workplace, UX and change management. He is finding gamification angles in each project that requires long-term strategies, user engagement and behavior change (which is pretty much every implementation project). Jan is passionate about schools and learning and also works part-time as a hospital clown. He is active within in the gamification community and also one of the founders of the Swedish podcast Gamificationfredag. Watch his fresh mini vlog series about gamification in Swedish "Gamificationskolan" that runs in December.

Naomi Pariseault is an instructional designer for the School of Professional Studies at Brown University. As with many other instructional designers, it was a fortunate happenstance that Naomi stumbled into the field and has been happily inspiring student learning since 2011. She loves to experiment with new design approaches. It's been a dream to blend together the principles of game design with learning to create gamified courses. Growing up Naomi loved playing classic video games and could be found playing Atari Asteroids with her dad or Super Mario 64 and Kirby with her cousin. Naomi has earned both the Level 1 and Level 2 Certifications from Sententia Gamification. She was also the instructional designer of the winning project of the Outstanding use of Gamification for Learning in GamiCon 2018 in Chicago!

David Chandross began his career as a neuroscientist working in the field of selective attention and cognitive science. After receiving his Ph.D. in curriculum and a second masters degree in medical education he went on to become an academic Dean and then held positions in senior administration across Canada in higher education. His work in gamification began in the 1990s and matured in at Ryerson University after which he accepted a position at the Simon Fraser University in the field of gamification under a 5-year, $3 million dollar simulation and advanced gaming environments federal grant. Currently, Dr. Chandross holds the position of program coordinator with Ryerson University and participates in research initiatives in gamification with Baycrest Health Sciences, the College of Family Physicians, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto and other institutions to further the implementation of game-based learning in higher education.

This episode we offer our own tribute to one of Marvel's greatest superheroes: Stan Lee. I discuss some of the things we can learn from his legacy to apply to our daily practice of gamification.