Dyson Made 5,127 Prototypes. Nobody Remembers Number 4,000: A second look at learning and the upside of failing

Everyone has a favorite invention story.

For some, it’s the bagless vacuum and tireless iteration. In the late 1970s, engineer James Dyson set out on a quest. How could he harness the air-cleaning power of the industrial sawmill to fix the clog-prone household vacuum? It took him five years and 5,127 prototypes to figure it out. Result? The Kleeneze Rotork Cyclon.

For others, it’s the flash of insight and the happy accident. Remember the scene in How Do You Know where Paul Rudd (as George) tells Reese Witherspoon (as Lisa) how nursery school teacher Kay Zufall invented a new use for a surplus of wallpaper cleaning putty? World, meet Play-Doh.

But what about the countless, quiet, and murky attempts at an invention when there’s no clear payoff? What of Dyson’s attempts in year four and prototype 4,000? Or the wallpaper cleaner that never becomes anything else?

Those stories often disappear like so many hand-cramped field notes.

That’s no accident. We tend to revere results, and downplay tries and daydreams. In his Advice to a Young Tradesman, Benjamin Franklin famously railed against the cost of sloth. “Remember that time is money,” he wrote. “Trouble springs from idleness,” he pronounced, in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

But it turns out when it comes to children and learning, wayward tries may actually mean a lot.

Manu Kapur at ETH Zurich has spent his career studying failure as a design principle in STEM classrooms. “Failure can be a very good teacher,” he says. “What if designing for failure could be the locus of powerful learning?” (TEDxLugano) Researchers Erika Lunkenheimer and Jun Wang found that three-year-olds who kept trying after a hiccup showed stronger motivation months later (Journal of Child and Family Studies).

Columbia researcher Jenna Marks asked something else: whether explicitly teaching middle schoolers to prototype early and iterate often could change not just how they felt about failure, but how well they performed. It did—those students built better final designs than peers who weren't taught the practice (Columbia University).

This value—of tinkering and tries that may not win—shapes a number of collections on Mizzen, where activities focus on hypothesizing, experimenting, persistence and problem-solving, rather than prescribed outcomes.

Design activities build in engineering principles as children dream, create, test, and refine prototypes. Gardening activities trace earth’s cycles of sun and rain, as youth learn how to plot raised beds, fortify soil, and water with care.

Try it in your program

In Nickelodeon Our World: The Design Lab (grades K–2, 3–5), a collaboration of Nickelodeon and Mizzen Education, Junior Funologists imagine, tinker, and test their way through ten engineering missions, from rescuing a trapped blueprint to designing the playground of the future. Each mission invites a second and third try, and that iteration is where much of the learning happens.

In Growing Gardeners, a collaboration of Farm to Table Kids, Coast of Maine, and Mizzen Education, youth plan, plant, and tend gardens through lessons, seasonal playlists, and how-to videos from Farmer Steph. The Year-Round Gardening Playlist moves season by season, from bulb planting to harvest, so the waiting in between becomes part of the lesson.

There’s no guarantee their prototypes will succeed or that, come spring, every bulb will burst into bloom. That uncertainty is part of the magic when they do. But trying and not knowing can nourish children along their way as much as the excitement of the first spring crocus.