THE ALLURE OF PLAY (Available now!)
This page is the official site for Tori and Joe’s co-written book The Educator’s Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises: The Allure of Play, published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press. It also contains information about their ALLURE professional development workshops, videos, and other resources they’ve created to help instructors and program directors. To visit their individual professional sites, see www.joebisz.com or www.victoriamondelli.com.
ORDER THE BOOK
You can purchase it at Amazon. (Please use this direct link). If you wish to make a bulk order, and you’ll be seeing one of us at a workshop/event, contact us directly.
Is your background other than higher or secondary education? Please note that the book’s *examples* (e.g. the example activities, the anecdotes) were limited to higher and secondary ed. However, as many of you know from attending our workshops, our playful design methods and concepts are understandable and appliable to the following audiences as well: elementary-level teachers, homeschool instructors, business trainers seeking to enhance their presentations, and game designers theorizing their instructional games (analogue or digital). If you’d rather be sure, you can examine some sample pages in the Google preview (we suggest Chapter 1) or the Amazon “Look Inside” feature.
DOWNLOAD THE BOOK’S WORKSHEETS – AND OTHER ITEMS MENTIONED INSIDE
Download the Design Worksheets here. (Or here from TCP.)
We’re still working on putting the other items on this website. Check back again by early May 2023!
GET THE COMPLEX MECHANICS FLASHCARD GAME
Remember the book’s lovely illustrations of the complex mechanics and simple mechanics? You can purchase a set of them as full-color flashcards that provide you with a quick, focused way to brainstorm your creative activities in a playful fashion. Go here.
GET THE INFOGRAPHIC AS A FULL-COLOR WALL POSTER
This is figure 10.1 in the book: “The Allure Model for Designing Playful Active-Learning Exercises and Games” (p. 212-214). We’re still working on this. Check back again by early May 2023!
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS & HOW TO BRING US TO YOU
Joe and Tori are both international speakers, and present individually or together. Their speciality is creative professional development (and a few other areas) that show teachers how to design more creative active-learning exercises, especially through play and games. Talk to someone at your school’s Center for Teaching and Learning if you have one, else a faculty dean or principal, so that you can aim for as large and broad an audience as possible. This means you should describe what we do as “creative active-learning”, not “games”, since the word “games” unfortunately connotes passive video game playing to many people. But who doesn’t want an all-star workshop on creative active-learning? To read more about either of us or to contact us, visit www.joebisz.com/speaker or www.victoriamondelli.com.
DESIGN FOR ONLINE!
June 2020: We know many of us must now teach online for the first time. In addition, both first-timers and veterans are forced to teach online curricula only intended for in-person instruction. Yet the need to keep active learning a part of student education is still high. So we created a video and several other resources to help you design for online, while keeping things playful for your students—and yourself!
Visit our DESIGN FOR ONLINE page by clicking here.
This page includes:
• Infusing our Online Learning Environments with Play [Video]: The best-designed instruction is playful. Therefore, our first video discusses how to make your lessons and activities in your online classroom more interactive. (Our design method also applies to in-person classes.) In addition, it describes how to build visual learning activities in PowerPoint your students can play together online.
• PowerPoint Games You can Design [Resources]: We provide a PowerPoint file containing several activity-game templates you can download and freely modify, which are very useful for hosting online activities.
TAP INTO THE ALLURE OF EDUCATIONAL GAMES
Join our announcement-only email list by sending a blank email to: 
You will get a confirmation email within an hour with a link to subscribe. You will learn of our book-related events in major cities (like the CUNY Games Conference), online presentations by us, and new resources or games we’ve created for you. If you already receive educator announcements from Joe or Tori, there’s no need to join this list. No more than 6 emails per year.
