Matthew Farber's 2017 Serious Play Conference Preview

The Serious Play Conference scheduled a series of speaker previews in the weeks before its 2017 edition. Farber's session was set for Thursday, June 8 at 4 p.m. Pacific time. The conference itself was planned for July 18 to 20, 2017 at George Mason University's Science and Technology Campus in Manassas, Virginia, near Dulles Airport.

His question was how educators use serious games to give students agency while teaching the 21st century skills of empathy, systems thinking and design thinking. That question drove his dissertation on educators who are experts in game-based learning, and it now leads into a newer inquiry into teachers who see themselves as learning designers. Other previews in the series covered positive teen development through games with Heidi McDonald (May 22), global cultural learning in the classroom with David Conover (June 14) and engaging at-risk students with David Crusoe (June 22).

The dissertation was expanded into a book, Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games, from Peter Lang Academic. It follows one affinity group of K-12 educators known as The Tribe and details how their classrooms work, from how they roll out games to how they assess learning outcomes.

At the time Farber was a social studies teacher at Valleyview Middle School in Denville, New Jersey. He also taught as an adjunct at New Jersey City University, lectured part time at Rutgers University, blogged for Edutopia and co-hosted Ed Got Game on the BAM Radio Network. His earlier book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning, was also published by Peter Lang Academic.

Farber's own website, matthewfarber.com, is online and gives a different position from the 2017 biography: associate professor of educational technology at the University of Northern Colorado, where he co-directs the Gaming SEL Lab. Its book list dates Game-Based Learning in Action to 2018 and lists a revised edition of Gamify Your Classroom from 2017. Newer titles include Gaming SEL (Peter Lang, 2021), Roll for Learning, an edited volume of micro tabletop role-playing games for the classroom (Play Story Press, 2024), and The Well-Read Game, written with Tracy Fullerton (MIT Press, 2025).

The Serious Play Conference also continues. Its homepage lists a 3 to 5 August edition at the University of Washington in Seattle, with 2026 speaker and program pages, plus a European edition.