Tyne Crow has taught digital technologies teacher at Pakuranga College and is currently a teaching fellow for the Auckland ICT Graduate School. He has worked with game development in junior digital technologies and facilitated a student driven game development club. Students from the club went on to develop and sell a VR game. This also involved connecting students to the game dev community through organising trips to The Auckland Game Development Meetup and industry site visits. He is passionate about integrating game development into the classroom so all students can collaboratively engage in learning through creating enjoyable games they are enthusiastic about playing and sharing.

Diana-Grace Morris  is a passionate educator with an interest in digital cultures and how futures thinking and ideas about complexity challenge many of the norms and assumptions of teachers' work. In 2016 she collaborated with her Year 7 & 8 students to transform an ordinary classroom into a year-long game design studio workshop. In 2017 she used game design in her work as a lecturer in the School of Education at AUT University, and currently brings games into her work as an RTLB in Wellington. Diana-Grace is totally convinced that Game Design facilitates improvement of ideas within diverse groups.  Her favourite games are Never Alone and Spaceteam. Once, she was killed by a polar bear 94 times in one night!​

Dan Milward is the founder and CEO of Gamelab, and his goal in life is to make game creation accessible to everyone, including learners and teachers with no prior knowledge of coding and game design. Dave Thornycroft, in addition to being Gamelab’s lead content artist, has facilitated game coding workshops with hundreds of young New Zealanders and teachers.

Gamelab are the team behind Gamefroot, an online platform that enables young people to learn through making and building their own games and simulations. Dan and his team have run game creation and design workshops for young people and adults in schools, libraries, and museums all over New Zealand. Gamelab run highly successful after-school Game Dev Clubs in a number of Wellington schools and will be expanding to more centres in 2019.

Rich began integrating play into his own science curriculum, and continues today with the University of Auckland and his consultancy, Wondertree Studio.

He enjoys smooshing disparate things together “just to see what we can learn,” and is grateful for the many amazing collaborations he’s had over the years:

Everything from Māori history tabletop game for school teachers, a conservation mega-game for Vietnamese youth, a card game for a cryptography conference, to street games for festivals in Auckland, Rich looks for projects expanding the reach of playful experiences and through that engagement help make the world a better place.

Rachel Bolstad is a senior researcher and emerging game designer at NZCER. Rachel led the planning and programming for the 2017 Games for Learning conference, and has led a research project by the same name. She regularly blogs about game-based learning and game design in the classroom. Rachel is a contributor and guest editor to a forthcoming special issue of the journal Set: Research information for teachers on “Playing, gaming, and learning”.

Since leaving the classroom in 2013, Chris has worked in for a range of start-ups, NGOs and corporations to support the development of powerful learning experiences. Chris's most recent work has been oriented towards to future and has involved him co-designing Singularity U's "Find Your Billion" programme, becoming a Faculty member of Boma-New Zealand and Director of Futures Thinking at Diocesan School for Girls.

Since the future only exists in our imagination, it is a great context for game development. This has led to Chris developing games that help young people grapple with the future by supporting their thinking and meaning making. Games have ranged from supporting environment scanning to open up future possibilities through to understanding the dynamics of the complex adaptive systems on which our civilisation rests.

Catherine Hunter is a Science and STEM teacher at Mission Heights Junior College. She uses her love of games to increase classroom engagement and to "trick" students into learning. Catherine helped develop MHJC's new STEM course, where students are introduced to game design concepts, coding and robotics.  

Catherine is leading the organising of the Auckland 2018 Games for Learning workshop with the support of colleagues at MHJC and NZCER.

Andrew Savage is a history educator and deputy principal at Wellington High School who primarily uses non-digital games as a method to engage students with history's complexity. He has a particular interest in how games can generate debate, hone students' argumentation skills and develop critical thinking when applied to historical contexts and their contemporary implications.