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

Abstract

Chelsea Andrews is a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University in the STEM education program. She received a B.S. from Texas A&M University in ocean engineering and an S.M. from MIT in civil and environmental engineering. Her current research includes investigating how children engage in engineering design through in-depth case study analysis.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Failure and Idea Evolution in an Elementary Engineering Workshop (Fundamental) AbstractIn 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 ta...

Kindergartners’ Engagement in an Epistemic Practice of Engineering: Persisting and Learning from Failure

“…Those students whose designs initially failed and who subsequently engaged in failure analysis and improvement-akin to Crismond's four-part diagnostic troubleshooting process [9,10]-had a more robust understanding of reasons for design success or failure. Andrews work and our own also supports the idea that design testing processes need to be followed accurately and testing results be interpretable in order to support the failure analysis and improvement process [12,13].…”

“…• Denying that failure occurred by ignoring proper testing processes Andrews examined how upper elementary student thinking evolved within an engineering workshop. Andrews found that challenges that were too easy and thus, resulted in few design failures, did not push students to evolve in their thinking about the underlying reasons for design success [13]. Those students whose designs initially failed and who subsequently engaged in failure analysis and improvement-akin to Crismond's four-part diagnostic troubleshooting process [9,10]-had a more robust understanding of reasons for design success or failure.…”

A Review of Theory and Methods for Sociocultural Research in Science and Engineering Education

“…This may help reposition failure away from negative perceptions. Other studies on failure in engineering design have also shown the importance of facilitation and how frequent failure leads to a higher engagement with thoughtful design and engagement with ideas about phenomena (Andrews, 2016).…”

Impact of a prototyping intervention on middle school students' iterative practices and reactions to failure

“…In addition, people may feel anxiety when pushed to iterate early and frequently (Dow et al, ). While some studies of iterative prototyping show middle school students engaging in many tries (Welch, ), they suggest that iterations can be unproductive without facilitators to help students reflect meaningfully on what went wrong and how to improve on the next try (Andrews, ). There are pragmatic barriers to iteration as well.…”