Turning Failure into Success: How Engineering Challenges Build Resilience and Problem Solving Across Contexts

Over the past decade, STEM education has embraced a three-dimensional, practice-based approach that emphasizes transferable disciplinary skills. Failure, integral to the engineering design process, views failure as an opportunity for learning and improvement, not an endpoint. Curriculum units that frame failure as a step in the iterative engineering design process help students learn to “flip the failure” by analyzing testing data, reimagining solutions, and improving designs. Such approaches to engineering can be used in both school and out-of-school-time programming (OST). This paper complements previous work on in-school contexts to present case studies of students from three OST contexts who, through their experiences with failure in engineering, demonstrated increased academic perseverance, risk-taking in language use, and redefined their self-concept as learners. Such success in lower-stakes OST spaces can nurture an expanded STEM identity that students can bring to in-school spaces as well. We then discuss strategies for educators to normalize failure in STEM, highlight its value in the learning process, and connect engineering failure to broader socio-emotional and 21st-century skills. Findings suggest that reimagining failure within engineering education can help youth apply this mindset to a variety of challenges, fostering greater resilience and self-efficacy both within and beyond STEM disciplines.