Productive failure in action

Abstract

In September 2021 the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering has implemented a completely revised bachelor. Important differences between the old and the new bachelor are its focus on design for higher complexity, the teacher as a coach, and the need for students to learn in an autonomous way. Within the bachelor, first year engineering students are introduced to the world of physical embodiment of products. This includes materials and design, manufacturing techniques, functional analysis, product architecture and mechanics modelling. In the past years we used a classical approach in teaching mechanics of materials using direct instructions and problem-based learning as the learning approach. Unfortunately, many design coaches observed that the acquired engineering knowledge was applied superficially or even left out of scope in students' design projects. The complete overhaul of the bachelor and the seemingly short retention of topics related to product engineering, made us change our learning approach from Direct Instruction to Productive Failure (PF). Making mistakes is an important condition for learning, and Productive Failure incorporates this while promoting autonomous learning. In essence, Productive Failure is a method that fosters effective learning and fits very well with a general design approach of iterative and explorative learning. During the development of UPE, we designed several workshops in a PF kind of fashion and applied it in the 2021 course. During the run we came across several hurdles in teaching, related to workshop design, and the impact of changing learning culture, and the teachers' role. This paper will discuss our findings when applying Productive Failure in our own class which is used to improve the course and line up the educational team in becoming productive-failure teachers.