Failure and Idea Evolution in an Elementary Engineering Workshop (Fundamental)

In the engineering education community, failure at the design stage has been promoted by researchers and policy documents, generally in an effort to engage learners in authentic engineering practices. Less often in engineering education, failure has been discussed as productive in its own right. One way failure may be beneficial is by encouraging students to revise and build on their ideas about why their designs are performing as they are. This connects directly to decades-old constructivist ideas that learning occurs through constructing, testing, and refining theories about how the world works. If students are indeed learning from failure, then we can expect to see evidence that their ideas progress over the course of a design task. This raises the questions: How do students’ ideas evolve over the course of a failure-prone engineering design task? And, what differences are seen between tasks with repetitive failure and tasks with ready success? To investigate these questions, I draw from literature examining failure in science and mathematics education to better understand the role that failure can play in engineering. I examine video data from a single-day engineering design workshop for 13 upper elementary students. I focus on two consecutive tasks: the wind tunnel task, which featured rapid iteration cycles and repetitive failure, and the water transport task, which featured near-immediate success. I closely examined student groups’ discourse and the changes they made to their design constructions following testing for evidence of the ideas informing their design decisions. For the wind task, the factors students attended to were coded, with codes such as, “weight of object,” and tracked both across groups and over time. The analysis revealed that some factors, such as weight, were common across all groups and persisted through the design task, while others, such as air flow, were taken up by a few groups, often after a long series of failures. Importantly, the initial factors, such as weight, were not abandoned in order to accommodate later factors, but rather factors appeared concurrently later in the task. In contrast, in the water transport task, there was little evidence that groups closely considered which factors led to the success of their designs and as a result there is little evidence that they built upon their initial ideas. I found that all groups used ideas about how the world works to respond to testing failures, and indeed, students seemed to be designing in a more sophisticated manner, attending to multiple factors of the task, after experiencing repetitive failure. These findings provide empirical support for failure as a productive aspect of engineering design tasks, providing opportunities for students to articulate and build on their ideas. Additionally, facilitators were found to serve an essential role by questioning, modeling, and challenging students during the task. These results have direct implications for engineering curriculum design and teaching practices; in short, it is critical that students are given reasonably difficult tasks that incorporate physical testing, are given time for multiple iteration cycles, and are supported as they design.