Learning From Productive Failure In Maker Education

In recent years,."Maker education" began to enter the classroom in primary and secondary schools in China. Through the long-term observation and depth of participation, Author founds that in "Maker education", the teacher pay too much attention to classroom tasks being successfully completed; and ignore students’ failure and the learning it may produce. Motivated by the concern about that, this paper will answer the following questions:What is Productive Failure? How does it work to increase learning? How to use this kind of failure experience of students in actual teaching? Can it really achieve the desired effect?In the literature research, this article concerned the Productive Failure theory and summarized its origin and development. Defined the concept of Productive Failure, and analyze the mechanism of how Productive Failure makes a positive effect to learning and why.In this research, we take reference to the instructional model called Designing for Productive Failure, and designed a school-based curriculum about Arduino intelligent robot. Then we observed and analyzed the students’response to study the effect of this model. The results showed that compared to other ways of teaching Arduino, the course designed for Productive Failure can make students more active in the curriculum. Students are able to put forward a more diversified solution to the task, and they can produce their own ideas in the course work. In addition, in the end of the project, some students use some of the knowledge which has never been listed as the teaching requirements in order to realize their ideas. This phenomenon reflects that they got better independent learning ability and the ability to transfer their knowledge from the curriculum. The results of the study provide a reference for the application of this instructional design model in similar courses.