Much of the appeal of educational games stems from the notion that players are persistent despite frequent failure and the possibility of re-producing that persistence in education. Our workshop brought together researchers in the humanities, cognitive science, and educational psychology as well as industry producers to discuss what makes failure appealing, why failure relates to learning, and how to design for productive failure. We explained why players seek out failure in video games when it makes them feel bad and what that means for learning. Confusion, in particular, facilitates learning when experimentally induced via the presentation of system breakdowns, contradictory information, and false feedback in learning tasks with computer agents. Individual differences in motivation, however, moderate learners’ adaptive and non-adaptive responses to failure. The workshop generated discussions on how research can inform design and provided an example of a math program strategically developed to foster productive failure.
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