2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering students benefit from learning to fail, developing resilience, humility, and persistence- valuable habits for their academic experience and for their future careers. As a result, some engineering educators are introducing low-stakes failure opportunities into their courses to help students engage productively with failure and to move from a grades-first mindset to a learning-first mindset.

One model that is becoming increasingly popular to introduce students to productive failure is competency or mastery based learning. In this model, students must demonstrate mastery of required skills in order to pass the course, primarily through low stakes quizzes that can be repeated after failure. In order to earn a higher grade, students can master more complex skills introduced throughout the semester.

The mechanical engineering program at [Blinded] University has implemented several mastery-based learning courses, but the ECE program has no such courses. This paper outlines the development of a mastery-based embedded systems course for upper level electrical and computer engineering students aimed to introduce productive failure into the ECE curriculum.

This work details the course design and student performance (number of attempts for each skill, overall competency measures).