Game On! Podcast featuring guest Dr. Matthew Farber

In this episode of GAME ON, Adam Bellow interviews Matthew Farber, an expert in gaming and educational games. The two discuss the importance of play and his work on social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies in games. Farber describes his Gaming SEL Lab, which studies and develops curriculum around games that enhance SEL skills such as empathy, compassion, and perspective-taking. He also discusses his favorite childhood games, including board games, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and Commodore 64 computer games, as well as his recent gaming experiences with Life is Strange 2 and Before Your Eyes, a game in which players relive and redo moments in their life every time they blink. Farber explains that his path to studying games and learning began with the educational game iCivics, which he used as a social studies teacher, and led to his interest in project-based learning and writing for Edutopia.

About Dr. Matthew Farber

Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Northern Colorado, where he co-directs the Gaming SEL Lab. Author of several books and papers, he studies how playing and making games can cultivate (or limit) social and emotional learning (SEL) skills, such as empathy, compassion, and ethics. Dr. Farber also writes for Edutopia (The George Lucas Education Foundation), has been invited to the White House, and has collaborated frequently with UNESCO and Games for Change. 

Connect with Matthew using the links below:

Game On! – Guest Matthew Farber - Transcript 

Adam Bellow (00:01.161)

I'm your host, Adam Bellow, and I'm really excited to be joined with just an incredible educator and someone who really knows the field of gaming and educational games really, really well, someone I've bumped into many times over the last several years, and I'm super excited to have him on the show. Dr. Matthew Farber. Matthew, welcome.

Matthew Farber (00:25.970)

Hi, thanks to be here, excited to be here. And thanks for having me on. And yeah, as you're saying that, I can't remember the last time we saw each other because there was something going on around 2020 for a couple of years and can't quite remember that.

Adam Bellow (00:37.641)

Oh, what was that? Oh yeah, yeah, maybe that was a pause. I think – actually, I was thinking about it. I think the last time we saw each other was at the museum, was it in Palo Alto? Yes, the Computer History Museum out in California. So that was super fun. A couple of years ago.

Matthew Farber (00:47.970)

Computer History Museum. Yeah. Yeah. I put my timeline as based on educational trends. So at that point, the Uber driver was asking about blockchain on the way to that conference. So then we've gone from like blockchain to NFTs to the metaverse, and now we're at chat, now we're in Chat GPT, right? That's where we are. Yeah.

Adam Bellow (01:09.081)

Yeah, that's it. Only for the next few minutes. And the next big thing is coming again. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Apple's about to reinvent or invent AI, right? Or AR. That's what I'm waiting for. Yeah, it'll be super fun. Well, awesome. Well, again, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. You know, obviously, I could introduce you. I know you've been doing a tremendous amount of things

Matthew Farber (01:17.970)

Oh, shiny. Right, yeah.

Adam Bellow (01:38.901)

written a whole bunch of books, most recently, book about gaming and SEL, which obviously for us here at Breakout, that's super exciting and important work as well. But why don't you give, you know, for the people that don't know who you are, how would you describe yourself to someone, your elevator pitch as to the work that you do?

Matthew Farber (01:54.790)

Sure, thanks. I study games and learning, specifically games, and social and emotional learning. Even more specifically, those competencies, SEL could be a pretty broad term, and there's like 146 frameworks for real. So I look at empathy or empathic concern, how that empathy can lead to compassion, pro-social gaming, perspective taking, and those competencies in making games different types of games. So I have a lab called the Gaming SEL Lab where we play and create curriculum around games. We develop games. We're doing that now and we are also studying existing games and game programs.

Adam Bellow (02:42.741)

That's incredible. I feel like I want to be a student. I mean, that's an awesome, awesome class. You know, that's great. So I guess we'll get started. You know, our level one question here, the podcast always starts with a question, play obviously is super important to us here at Breakout ED. We take it super seriously. So I'm always interested in learning, you know, what was your favorite game to play as a kid? And what are you playing now? And the honest answer, you know, obviously when you were a kid,

Matthew Farber (02:46.350)

Thank you.

Adam Bellow (03:12.701)

have to be video game it could be whatever board game tag doesn't matter and the same for now but I know you've been playing a lot of stuff so I'd love to kind of know your past favorite and then current favorite

Matthew Farber (03:23.332)

Sure, that's a great question. So I think about this sometimes. The games I play growing up, I mean, I played the traditional family board games, Scrabble, Monopoly, right? I was terrified of Perfection. I didn't know those pegs would fly in the air. Still, still scarring. And I was at Avid, choose your own adventure book reader, Dungeons and Dragons early on, you know.

Adam Bellow (03:37.781)

Oh yeah. That's right.

Matthew Farber (03:50.470)

80s period and I had a Commodore 64 computer so that really left a big imprint on me playing all sorts of games on there. For some reason I like this game Ghostbusters that was there at the time which was uh yeah Impossible Mission was another one I remember liking that on the Commodore 64. I mean I had Atari but I really liked the Commodore 64 computer games. You know and yeah it's so cool.

Adam Bellow (04:02.762)

I totally played that. Totally played that. Yeah, that's awesome. Did you ever play Space Harrier? 

Matthew Farber (04:20.310)

Yeah! You can code on it too. I remember playing Lemonade Stand and then there was like a video store called, I forgot what it was called, Video Den, right? Kind of a shady name, I guess. But Video Den and I made like a knockoff of Lemonade Stand but about renting videos and returning them. And yeah, I didn't really thought about that until like now, right? I guess that's what eventually led me back to this path here.

Adam Bellow (04:30.901)

Ha ha. That's awesome. Did you code in BASIC? That was the navy blue screen with a slightly lighter border around it - spent many hours on that screen.

Matthew Farber (04:49.050)

Of course, I did. It was so frustrating.

Matthew Farber (04:57.130)

Yeah, like I remember introducing my kid to like twine coding and that and he just finished learning a python and micro bits in sixth grade class and like, I wonder where I would be today if that was what was available back then right those languages because I got frustrated I quit because of like the frustrations of basic.

Adam Bellow (05:10.481)

It's incredible. It's really awesome. I think everybody. I mean, like that's a very common theme. My son's doing Swift right now. He's going through all those modules for Apple. He loves it.

Matthew Farber (05:20.750)

That's okay. That's fine. The dreaded syntax error. Remember that?

Adam Bellow (05:28.441)

Yep. Yep. Well, of course you're right. You know, I would take up books from the library, I would copy pages and pages of code to make whatever game it was, alter it the way I wanted to, and then all of a sudden realize there's a typo somewhere, but I don't know which of the 1200 lines there was a typo in. So what about now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So what about now?

Matthew Farber (05:40.730)

Exactly. Boy, we're old. I know, chat GPT can code, which is like, whoa. It's insane. Yeah, right now I just finished playing a game. Well, I just started playing a game called Life is Strange 2, which I played the other ones. I played the most recent one, Life is Strange, True Colors, where your super power is empathy. And for, I'm doing this,

Adam Bellow (05:47.881)

It's insane. Oh, it's so cool.

Matthew Farber (06:10.710)

research also to see what the emotions like. And a game I just finished which I recommend is called Before Your Eyes. And Before Your Eyes is a, I play a lot of sad games. So, and this one you replay somebody's life story. And the interface is blinking. So I played on an iPad but you can play at Steam on your webcam and you control like normal. But every time you blink your eyes, that memory you're reliving is over and you can't go back. So you're on a beach blanket with your mother and you keep your eyes open really as much as you can to take in as much as you can and when you blink maybe it's the next day the next hour maybe it's five years later and you get to relive and then redo all these moments in your life. It's quite a powerful experience.

Adam Bellow (06:57.182)

Oh my gosh.

Adam Bellow (07:03.221)

That's amazing. That's really, really amazing. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, and I played Life of Strange the first one. I didn't know there was a second one out, so I haven't seen that yet.

Matthew Farber (07:12.710)

Yeah, that one came out maybe like five years ago and people kept telling me to play it. The newest one is called True Colors, Life of Strange True Colors. It was actually developed in Colorado and it takes place up in a mountain town that kind of looks like Wrecking Ridge. That's what I think it is. Yeah, and it's a beautiful game.

Adam Bellow (07:22.167)

Oh cool.

Adam Bellow (07:29.842)

Okay, that's awesome.

Adam Bellow (07:33.761)

I'll definitely check that out then. Very, very cool. All right, so our level two questions about history, right? So everyone's got an origin story. Obviously we've been doing this work for a while. What is it that kind of put you on the path to be doing the work you're doing today?

Matthew Farber (07:59.290)

Okay, well, that's an interesting question too, because when we're talking about games, I did not play games for a middle period, I guess, you know? And after college, my job, my career before teaching. But I would say what specifically put me on this path was the game, the educational game, iCivics, the platform of games, I should say, because I was a social studies teacher. So do I have the right, I think that was the name of the game, and when the White House,

I played in my social studies class and students would go home and play them again and again. And I was like, wow, this is this is great. I wish there was something like this. I need 179 more of these games. So we could do this every day. And I realized that's just not the case. There are not enough quote good educational games. But then I when I married it together with project based learning like play win the White House for one class, and then we'll have like genius hour on

Adam Bellow (08:30.601)

sir.

Matthew Farber (08:59.010)

You know becoming project-based learning teaching somebody else the electoral college, you know It's I realized it's very much like Minecraft So it's like survival mode and then creative most project-based learning at around that time I was getting my master's degree and I started writing for Edutopia which I realized I've been writing for Edutopia for at least a little over a decade now, which is like mind-blowing and My Edutopia Editor at the time

Adam Bellow (09:20.364)

Wow.

Matthew Farber (09:28.910)

was just saying, you know, you wrote about games, why don't you keep writing about games? And I just kept continuing down that path.

Adam Bellow (09:37.101)

That's awesome. So that kind of spurred this whole thing, huh?

Matthew Farber (09:40.670)

It did, it really did. Yeah, and collaborations with UNESCO over the years, their work on digital pedagogy games and SEL, that kept me going on that path. Yeah, and part of my work with social-emotional learning games, honestly, was I would see sometimes on Twitter like years ago, like, oh, here's two kids sharing a Chromebook together. They're doing teamwork. We check the SEL block. You know, there's a lot of that.

Adam Bellow (09:51.990)

I thought.

Adam Bellow (10:08.781)

Huh. Sure.

Matthew Farber (10:10.970)

you know, because when you look at standards, you can almost map anything to anything, right? But I knew for instance, any cooperative board game, not one where everybody gets a soccer trophy, but ones like pandemic, that board game, or an escape room, like, or escape room in a box, let's say, we'll call that breakout EDU, right? You can really see the games as an effective practice space

Adam Bellow (10:30.901)

Thank you.

Matthew Farber (10:40.850)

learning skills like self-regulation, goal setting, perspective taking, really come into action and I find those really interesting spaces to research and explore.

Adam Bellow (10:56.221)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's ultimately, obviously it's something we focus on quite a bit. It's very, very important, and we'd like to think of them as not necessarily soft skills, but really the essential skills that these students really need. We've found, I don't know if this is something you've found in your work, is there has been some schools that push back on the term SEL, and we've found just like, oh, what do you focus on specifically, or more questioning there? Have you had that recently? Have there been any sort of pushback defining SEL or people that are kind of trying to shy away from the term because they don't really necessarily understand it.

Matthew Farber (11:34.172)

Yeah, you could say that in a bit, right? And it's I'm always like, well, you know, SCL has been around as long as like Mr. Rogers, but it actually has been around as long as we're humans because, you know, let's say the castle framework, for instance, right? And castle and the and SCL, the term itself, that started in 1994 or so when there was a meeting of academics and scholars and so forth.

Matthew Farber (12:00.910)

The outcome of the meeting was the term SEL and CASEL. So that was already like 25 years ago. I find it interesting because it's originations are about the book Emotional Intelligence, which is like a business book. You and I travel a lot. We're at a lot of airport bookstores, right? And that's that Emotional Intelligence book is always still there, the carousel and all like the Hudson Newsstands, right?

Matthew Farber (12:31.150)

I mean, what's more, right? So, I mean, that's really the origination of SEL as it's not necessarily even character education. It's intentionally a little bit different in that it starts with emotional intelligence. That's always been around. Now, as a researcher, we ran into this issue. We studied this platform called PikaPak. And I do some advising with PikaPak, which is a great digital e-book series.

Matthew Farber (13:01.350)

So what it is, is a series of what is called bibliotherapy. And bibliotherapy is when you read books that have messages. So psychologists may share books with children who are experiencing parents who are divorcing. And they'll give them a book and they'll read that story about that. But their bibliotherapy goes back to religious parables, ASOPs, fables, right? Stories about why you should be honest, right? Why you should be, have empathy, right?

Matthew Farber (13:31.710)

And this has been around as long as we've been humans, right? These sorts of stories with messages. So anyway, we did this study with PikaPak in a large school district, and we used a preset measurement platform that just said, oh, SEL. And that platform didn't actually measure empathy. It only measured like three components of SEL, and they just used the word SEL. It's quite broad.

Matthew Farber (14:00.850)

We found that no difference between the control group and the experimental group using PicaPak. And we think the reason was that it wasn't even measuring what we needed to measure. So we've been in our process now of developing our own measurement for PicaPak specifically. That way we can measure what it is that we're even talking about because people throw around SCL so broadly. You know? Like, here's an example.

Adam Bellow (14:28.201)

Right.

Matthew Farber (14:30.910)

educators, I'm sure know this. When we're talking about project-based learning, PBL works as a great resource. And they have the eight gold standard, the eight components. And you can print that out and do a checklist. Authentic audience, driving question. But the castle framework, for instance, you can't really do that. You can't say that there's going to be empathic concern, goal setting, teamwork lesson. It's not like a checklist, even though it's a framework. I think it's best to sometimes think about the competencies that undergird the framework. Quandary is a really good video game that is about from MIT, etc. It's in the Learning Games Network. I think it's on BrainPop also. It looks at only ethical decision-making and perspective taking. That's it. Maybe

Matthew Farber (15:30.970)

So when that conversation topic comes up, my advice is to maybe just don't even say SEL, talk about perspective taking, right? Because that's really what we're talking about, right? Because SEL can be a pretty broad, nebulous thing. And educators and education systems in general love acronyms.

Adam Bellow (15:52.281)

Yes, we do. Yes, we do. It's alphabet soup over here. And so, yeah, I like that advice too. I mean, you mentioned over 170 different things that SEL could potentially relate to. So defining and then really kind of giving a, you know, an understanding as to what that is and why we're, why we're caring about it. It's pretty clear. So Yeah, like my wife teaches in a pretty red school district, we'll say, right? And there's not a lot in Colorado, but she is in one. And they have the mood meter and all that, right? And that's for people not listening who don't know. It's from the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence, but you can Google mood meter and four quadrants with different emotions. And we don't talk, I don't know if anybody even uses the word SEL with that. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But it's about identifying feeling in the day and putting a word to it and understanding that emotion and how that might drive your daily experience.

Adam Bellow (16:52.521)

Yeah, I mean, it's so as I said before, I mean, it's just obviously all your work focuses on this now. It's so vitally important. And I think it's something that that schools really, as you said, they've been doing it for a long time. And whether they call it SEL or not, I feel like it's it's something that they need to focus on, you know, that there are there are students that desperately need this, especially coming out of the pandemic and coming out of all these other social things going on that we hear about on the news every day. So, um,

Matthew Farber (17:19.549)

Yeah, it's super important and neural pathways are really, the neuroplasticity of the youth's brain. So if it's a early childhood or adolescent, it's very important to talk about these things. And when I was a teacher, advisory was a big part of middle school education, then they've done that since like the 90s, the school I was teaching at, and they're doing it right now at my son's school. So we could say STL is part

Matthew Farber (17:51.198)

It's always been part of good schooling, right?

Adam Bellow (17:53.321)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, we kind of touched on a little bit of what our level three question is, but I want to go a little deeper into it. And I'm sure you have a different answer about challenges, right? So what has been, you know, maybe the biggest challenge or obstacle that you've overcome in your journey to kind of get where you are now?

Matthew Farber (18:13.090)

Dissertation. Just kidding. Now, can you repeat the question, the challenge of getting to here?

Adam Bellow (18:15.968)

Like all good doctors say, yes, exactly.

Adam Bellow (18:21.941)

Yeah, what's the biggest? Yeah, I think it's like one of the biggest obstacles or challenges that you faced in your journey to being where you are now.

Matthew Farber (18:30.791)

That's a great question. I would say the challenge is

Matthew Farber (18:37.610)

The challenge is within, I would say. So let's say I take like a hero's journey, look at this because, well, this is a true story. I, when I had my doctorate, I sent out, I think 58 was a number. I replied to 58 different applications. And it was a lot. And I realized I had to move. It was pretty likely I would have to move out of where I was living. And my wife would have to move.

Matthew Farber (19:08.430)

And I literally did get a call to adventure to accept the job, you know, out here in Colorado. And just like a hero's journey, it was a refusal of the call. I was like, thank you, I'm not sure if I could do this, but can I have some time to think about it? And then I spoke to my wife and she was like, no, you have to do this, we should do this. You know, it's our ticket out, essentially, right? And I call back and I took the job. And it was a lot.

Matthew Farber (19:37.670)

that again. Hopefully I would never want to do that again because here I am. But it was a lot, like, you know, uprooting and moving across the country. You know, my wife got a job here and she finished out her master's degree where I'm teaching at the University of Northern Colorado. And my son's in a great school here. It's a competency-based, project-based learning type of school. It's great list. It's all the things we talk about, teach about, right?

Matthew Farber (20:07.630)

For that to all happen, there was a lot of effort involved and a lot of overcoming fear, essentially, right? Because I guess people do this all the time, right? People will move all the time. They change jobs all the time. But it's difficult, right? Yeah, that leap.

Adam Bellow (20:24.541)

It is. And I think it's interesting. Like, yeah, it's taking the leap. I think it's also like betting on yourself, you know, saying like, I can do it, I'll make it work. It'll work for my family. It'll work, you know, there are other logistics, obviously, that you have involved with it. I had a similar feeling. I worked, you know, I worked for the Obama White House for a while as a presidential innovation fellow, and was basically commuting during the week from New York down to DC. And it was one of those mental moments of like, should I do this? Like, this sounds like a

Adam Bellow (20:54.661)

My wife is a saint went along with it, but it's one of those things you need that support But yeah, you need the support, but you also have to bet on yourself and say hey I'm gonna make this an opportunity that's gonna be worthwhile So I'm obviously glad and you're obviously you are as well You've been in Colorado for how long like four or five years six years

Matthew Farber (20:58.761)

Same here.

Matthew Farber (21:12.471)

This is a sixth year now, and yeah, and I should say, I'm sure you know this as well, it's imposter syndrome, it's a big part of it. You know.

Adam Bellow (21:19.041)

Oh, yeah. Always. I mean, that's where I really, I always admire those that have the confidence to go forward and do anything. I even think it's, yeah, we can probably make a whole different show about that, but it's no, it's very, very true. It's very true. Well, I mean, you know, obviously, it's clear to everybody hearing you talk about your journey. And I love the fact you're calling it a hero's journey. And the work that you've done

Adam Bellow (21:48.901)

writing books and writing for Edutopia, which is one of those things that, A, we share in common and B, I've loved Edutopia since they were magazines and DVDs and back in the early 90s and early 2000s. All of those things, it's clear that you're very passionate about what you do. My question is, especially for you who's a lifelong learner and always trying to adopt new things and bring things into your either teaching or things that you're personally learning about, what is something that you were, you know, most passionate about right now, either learning more about or learning and teaching about?

Matthew Farber (22:29.030)

Um, let's see. Uh, one of the things the most passionate about is, um,

Matthew Farber (22:37.150)

All right, I'll say one of the other things we're passionate about is designing games like that aspect. Because I've been studying games for a while and getting to the creation part, I find very interesting. We are going to be having a call for a new book coming soon. And it's going to be about role-playing games in the classroom, tabletop role-playing games, because I feel like there's a lot there that can be even more so in classrooms because

Adam Bellow (23:29.365)

Oh, awesome.

Matthew Farber (23:37.670)

Well, there's not necessarily computers involved, right? It's an easier entry point for educators. Yeah, and I find that quite interesting. And I also like when kids are making games all the time. There's so much learning that goes on.

Adam Bellow (23:52.661)

That's awesome. So you've said a lot there and I'm, you know, personally I'm passionate about kids designing games. That's one of the big things we've been trying to do with breakout is build in digital game builders and really trying to let them use the tools that we personally use to create our own digital games that kids could use too. And giving them courses not about how to do it with pushing the right buttons, but like digging into kind of like the concepts behind it. So love that and building games of all other kinds. And then you're, you talked about role playing and talked about being a D&D fan.

Matthew Farber (24:12.150)

Mm-hmm.

Adam Bellow (24:23.001)

I have two D&D fanatics that I live with. My kids have been playing D&D pretty hardcore for the last, actually they're down in our basement right now playing on their digital map table. Yeah, that's their thing. So, I love that that's become, and I guess Stranger Things probably has something to do with it and now there's a big movie that's out and that's become very popular. And 100%, I mean, the SEL tie that literally can just tie back

Matthew Farber (24:43.976)

Yeah.

Adam Bellow (24:52.401)

things you've been talking about that you've been studying and working on. So I love that. It's really, really cool. And to see that come into the classroom with more acceptance and understanding, whether it's D&D or obviously, you know, there's, as, as you know, and I'm sure the audience knows there's a million different flavors, but, uh, it's really a pretty interesting thing to see. And that's, that's how my kids got into it was, it was for social skills and like developing those, those different pieces. So very, very cool.

Matthew Farber (25:19.193)

There's another thing I'm interested in as well. And I just had an article published this week. I wrote an article with Dr. Jim Erickson, who's a reading literacy professor here at UNC. And we wrote an article in Children's and Libraries, Children and Libraries, which is a journal from the American Library Association about games as paratex. So we're really interested in that way that you can take a book and a game, like a narrative game and a book and pair them together, invite them into literature circles and classrooms, how games have specific emotional affordances because a player agency. So in a game you may feel joy or pride, but you can also feel guilt and regret. And yes, there are citations for all of those. But we looked at this game called Lost Words Beyond the Page, which was written by Rihanna Pratchett.

Matthew Farber (26:14.030)

that she's actually Terry Pratchett's daughter, Terry Pratchett, the novelist. And she wrote a lot of really interesting games. This one tells two different stories. One is in pages of a, like a hero's journey, imaginative story, but the other real life one is told in the pages of a journal. And it's about the death of her grandmother and what effect that has on her family. And that part of the game is mapped to the stages of grief.

Adam Bellow (26:18.661)

Oh cool. Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Farber (26:44.310)

And we found a young adult novel that's taught in schools called titled The Thing About Jellyfish, which also has this parallel structure of a hero's journey and a journal. And it's about a young girl whose best friend drowned, but she thinks maybe if she understands about jellyfish stings, she might be able to process that better. And these two forms of media pair together in very powerful ways.

Adam Bellow (26:44.325)

Oh wow.

Matthew Farber (27:15.150)

to librarians to start considering different ways that there are different narrative games that you compare with text. I've done some work right now, I'm still doing work, with Tracy Fullerton at University of Southern California. She created Walden a Game, and we worked together on the curriculum of Walden a Game EDU. We've developed some card games too, which you can get on GameCraftor. If you look up Walden a Game EDU,

Matthew Farber (27:43.950)

play and that pairs the game and the book. Also the Thoreau's book and her game together. And yeah, and if you have Apple TV Plus, you can see a cameo of Tracy on Mythic Quest. Like the season one, yeah.

Adam Bellow (27:51.321)

That's awesome.

Adam Bellow (27:58.521)

Oh, very cool. That's awesome. Yeah, that's a great show. That's very, very cool. That's awesome. Well, it sounds like you're obviously interested in a lot, which I think related back to our passion conversation, which is great. You know, wrapping it up, like I feel like our level five question, which is our last round is about kind of the best advice you've gotten along your educational journey. So there's so many people that are listening that are just like, ah, what's the best nugget? And I feel like if you ask enough really smart people with.

Matthew Farber (28:03.571)

Yeah.

Adam Bellow (28:28.341)

with great stories like yourself, you get a really good collection of these. So what would be the best advice and advice that maybe would be relevant for listeners as well?

Matthew Farber (28:33.394)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Matthew Farber (28:39.110)

That's another great question. And I'm actually also another hat I wear is that I'm the coordinator for K-12 and secondary teacher education programs at our university, University of Northern Colorado. And my department, my classes were in teacher education. I teach pre-service teachers ed tech. So I give a lot of advice. And I think a really good advice is to follow your passions, right?

Adam Bellow (29:04.504)

Ha ha ha.

Matthew Farber (29:09.450)

but also to look at best practices that are out there. I lead teachers to, boy, I introduce them to Minecraft education and to edutopia. And so we play breakout early on in the courses. Every class we teach, I teach breakout EDU in my courses. I'm not saying that just because you're here, but I do that because I teach them how to use Google tools and so they can understand the T-PAC framework through experiences. And I just keep giving them,

Adam Bellow (29:26.161)

That's awesome.

Adam Bellow (29:34.746)

Mm-hmm

Matthew Farber (29:38.970)

a senior salary in my courses. And what they take away from that, I think, is how project-based learning and learning through projects and how they bring their own interests and passions to my courses is something that they can pay it forward to their students. So if they really love games, if they really love, I don't know, Shakespeare or podcasting, whatever it is, they can bring those experiences into their classrooms, but there's a lot there when you teach

Adam Bellow (29:41.243)

Awesome.

Matthew Farber (30:09.990)

You're meeting many aspects of universal design for learning. You're bringing in multi-modalities of learning, right? But to really boost those areas of passion, I think, to me, when I was teaching middle school, I didn't burn out because my class was one where it was more of games and puzzles, I'd say,

Matthew Farber (30:39.070)

ended, you know, I would just try anything, right? That would, that I think would be engaging and that also engaged students, but really kept the fire in me going. Long answer, but it's.

Adam Bellow (30:50.281)

Yeah, I mean, I think, no, no, a long answer, but it's great advice. And I think it harkens back to your other response about taking that leap when you moved out and, you know, took on your doctorate work. I think that that's, that's, you know, let passion drive you and don't be afraid to follow those dreams. I mean, I think that that's tried and true. So.

Matthew Farber (31:09.650)

Yeah, and you know, here's the other piece of advice here. One more is that, yeah, this is an tech thing, but I'm always like, hey, let's say podcasting or making a breakout game. I always tell students or going on Canva, I don't know. I say like, hey, don't feel like you have to be the expert of this. You have to just try it. You know, like don't teach a young adult novel without reading the novel, right? Just try it. But when you're in the classroom, when you look out, you don't have to worry about yourself being the game designer or the podcast expert.

Adam Bellow (31:12.442)

Yeah, go for it.

Adam Bellow (31:25.501)

Thank you.

Matthew Farber (31:39.590)

funny than right in front of you, right? Yeah, and that's where it gets exciting when you have 20 different brilliant projects to go through rather than 20 different worksheets.

Adam Bellow (31:41.501)

That's right. That's right. Yeah, I mean, there's...

Adam Bellow (31:49.201)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think everyone who's quote unquote expert has still obviously a lot left to learn. So I think that that's all great advice. Well, I mean, Matthew, thanks so much for for taking some time with us. Where can we find you online? I know we have the new book, which is. I have it right here. All right. I know you have the new book, which is gaming SEL games as transformational to social emotional learning. And you mentioned writing for Edutopia.

Matthew Farber (31:58.514)

Yeah.

Adam Bellow (32:19.101)

Get online.

Matthew Farber (32:20.570)

I try to keep my website up to date. So excuse me, MatthewFarber.com. And on Twitter, if anybody's still on there, I'm just kidding. Yeah, it depends on the day. Oh, I hate this site, I'm gonna stay on it, but whatever, that's life, right? But yeah, no, MatthewFarber.com, you'll find everything there as well.

Adam Bellow (32:25.702)

Awesome. Well, that's for

Adam Bellow (32:30.584)

Depends on the day.

Adam Bellow (32:35.901)

Thank you.

Adam Bellow (32:42.321)

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we'll provide all those links in the show notes. And again, thanks so much for taking some time. And until the next time, everyone, game on.