About Us

To make a long story short, David has been the “Professor of Fun” for 10 years and has given hundreds of talks on the topic and wrote a book: Fun, Taste, and Games. Then back in 2018, Lisa saw David give a talk about Fun in teaching and she was intrigued by the idea so she requested to meet with him to learn more about bringing fun into her classrooms. Since then, we have regularly met to think of new, fun, and playful ideas and together have also given talks to a couple of different faculty groups on the use of play and fun in teaching and learning. Along the way, we have come across a handful of other faculty who have used or are interested in fun and play in their classes so we created the Professors at Play listserv in order to stay in contact and keep the discussion going. Our community began with five members and then after Lisa’s Faculty Focus publication, hundreds of playful faculty/instructional designers started coming out of the woodworks! We are so excited you are here and we are hoping that this community serves as a positive, inviting, and playful space for people to share their experiences, develop their ideas, and get resources and inspiration about fun and play!

“I believe I was destined to be a playful professor from the time I was born. My mom tells stories of how silly I was as a kid and how I just always wanted to connect with people. I got into academia and found a lot of seriousness, stress, and formality. It wasn’t me but I was new and was trying to find my way as a developing faculty member. Without critically thinking about it, I tried to fit the “professor role” and quickly found that it not only clashed with my personality, it was draining all energy and passion from my bones. That’s when I heard David talk about fun in teaching and I immediately had a surge of energy, passion, and creativity. It felt like I had been called home.

I’ve spent a lot of time not only thinking about fun and play but also incorporating this way of being into my classrooms. I started with bringing “fun” into my classrooms with silly icebreaker games with the purpose of creating a sense of community and connection with the hope that comfort in community would increase students’ willingness to be vulnerable and if they were more willing to be vulnerable, they’d be more likely to take risks and make mistakes which I thought would lead to enhanced learning. With each semester and more and more reading on the topic, my understanding of how to incorporate fun into teaching has expanded. I started to see that “fun” is only the tip of the iceberg and that play and games are a part of the puzzle too. 

In the spring of 2020, I designed a research study to examine my own teaching practice of incorporating fun, play, and games in teaching and learning where I designed play as not only one part of my classes but as the foundation. Based on the overwhelmingly positive responses from my end-of-the-semester faculty course questionnaire feedback from students as well as the research data from student focus groups and journal entries, I will never teach any other way. Play has the ability to create connections, reduce stress, is student-centered and humanistic, allows students to overcome anxiety and fear of vulnerability, primes them for learning, is a vehicle for application of theory and skill acquisition, and produces longer-lasting learning.

I’ve never been one for traditions or doing things a certain way just because that’s the way it’s always been done so, I question the traditional lecture-based pedagogies that have been passed down from generation to generation of academics. I hope to join the faculty that challenge that old tradition and suggest an alternative approach – a playful approach!”

I have always been interested in the strange, the oddball, the unusual, the unique, the wonderful, the joyous and the playful. This love of play and fun lead me down a path of academic study and discourse that continues to provide delight and interest.

My road to becoming a professor at play has many stops. Most notably, I wrote about video games for almost 20 years, penning a column for the Denver Post and King Features syndicate, writing pieces of Wired, Electronic Gaming Monthly and NextGen. All those years of thinking about and playing games led me to want to understand what made one game better than another. I eventually found my way into a PhD program planning design in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado. There, I turned my interest in games and fun into a theoretical interest in fun places.

After completing my dissertation, I was fortunate enough to wrap up work on the book Fun, Taste and Games on MIT Press with my friend John Sharp.  John and I argued that games were naturally fun and that fun was an aesthetic form, related to, but different than beauty. Heady stuff. But I finally felt like it was OK to study fun. That’s about the time I dubbed myself The Professor of Fun.

In and around my more philosophical excursions around fun, I found myself speaking regularly to organizations about making their workplaces more playful. I have given my Wacky Workplaces talk to a growing number of groups, encouraging them to unlock play at work.

Though I spent my professional career in higher ed on the administrative side, helping the university move courses and curriculum online, it was not until recently that I was challenged to take my fun theory and apply it to education.

That’s when I met Lisa. She wanted to make teaching more fun and I told her I didn’t know how to do that, but I’d like to try. Together, we set out on a mission to find out how to make learning more effective by making it more fun.

A few years later and the Professor of Fun has finally started testing out the principles that we explore as Professors at Play!