Making People Fail

Despite our best efforts to design learning environments, at some point, a learner will fail in it. But failure, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. We argue that what matters more is how we, as educators, plan for that failure, and how we encourage learners to interpret that failure. In this paper, we leverage two areas of educational reform, games and making, to demonstrate a need to broaden our definition of failure and reconceptualize it as an integral part of the learning process. Rather than defining failure as a detrimental endpoint to learning, we discuss how these domains (games and making) expect and design for failure as part of the mastery process. We offer implication for learning and assessment with the hope of sparking a conversation among policymakers, educators, designers of learning environments, and learners.