Learning Interactives: Making Space to Fail

October 14th, 2026

By Jake Burton, Multimedia Specialist

What if we designed learning environments where failure wasn’t something students feared, but something they expected?

In engineering, trial and error is part of the process. We test, troubleshoot, redesign, and try again. Yet, in the classroom, I’ve noticed that students can sometimes approach failure very differently, as something to avoid rather than an opportunity to learn. This is one reason I believe learning interactives and game-based learning have so much potential.

I recently read Google Research’s article, The Future of Practice: Enabling Teachers to Create Learning Interactives with Generative UI, which explores using generative AI to help educators create custom, guided learning simulations. These interactives use game-based design principles, breaking complex topics into progressively challenging levels while providing hints, feedback, and scaffolding along the way. Rather than simply revealing an answer when a learner struggles, the experience encourages students to experiment, make adjustments, and work toward the solution themselves. For complex engineering concepts, I see tremendous value in creating more opportunities for this kind of active experimentation.

This idea also feels personal to me. When I immigrated to the U.S. as a child and was learning English, learning interactives gave me a space to practice without feeling like every mistake was permanent. I could try, fail, receive feedback, and try again. Years later, I’ve carried that experience into my work at the Fulton Schools of Engineering Learning and Teaching Hub, where I now co-lead our interactive workgroup and have developed more than 20 learning interactives for engineering courses. What continues to excite me is not simply the technology – it is the opportunity to design experiences that change how students perceive challenges. A wrong answer can become feedback. A difficult problem can become another level to work through. Failure can become part of learning rather than the end of it.

As generative AI makes interactive experiences easier to create and customize, I think we have an opportunity to reconsider what “practice” looks like in engineering education. The goal isn’t to gamify everything. It is to intentionally create spaces where students can explore difficult ideas, receive meaningful feedback, and build confidence through iteration. After all, if experimentation and failure are fundamental to engineering, shouldn’t our learning environments give students room to practice them?

_{Author’s Note: This article was drafted with the assistance of a generative AI tool to support wording and formatting; content generated by AI has been reviewed and approved by the author}.

References

Elidan, G., & Haramaty, Y. (2026). The future of practice: Enabling teachers to create learning interactives with generative UI. Google Research. https://research.google/blog/the-future-of-practice-enabling-teachers-to-create-learning-interactives-with-generative-ui/