Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

Productive Struggle calls on us frequently at Fab Lab ICC. No, I’m not talking about “Julia” with an urgent call to update my Google listing. That would be “unproductive struggle.” No matter how many times I block Julia’s number, she seems to be able to come up with another. I guess that’s another topic for another day. 

Lab manager Tim Haynes first heard the term Productive Struggle at the USA Fab Lab Network symposium he attended back in March of 2015 after we’d been open only six months. The term represents the idea that many activities in a Fab Lab or Maker Space are hard to do or learn at first, hence the “struggle” part. When we get past the struggle and learn or master the activity or task, we feel a certain sense of accomplishment, the “productive” part. Productive because each struggle that ends in accomplishment builds our self-confidence; the psychologists call it self-efficacy, a special kind of self-confidence that leads someone to become a better problem solver. This better problem solving ability knows no bounds, applying to all aspects of a person’s life, personal, professional, academic and even spiritual. 

Since I’m in the business of running a Fab Lab, I see lots of videos about new technological machines. Some of the machines are on the market, ready for purchase by a Fab Lab or Maker Space. Sometimes the machines are in development, with a Kickstarter campaign nearby just in case you want to invest in the further development of the machine. The videos never show the Productive Struggle involved with actually getting the machine to work. Those parts are conveniently edited out so that we get only the part of someone gingerly pushing a couple of buttons or clicking a couple of links with the end-product magically appearing a short time later. No muss, no fuss. In our experience, we have never used the terms no muss and no fuss with any of the machines we have set up an learned to use at Fab Lab ICC. 

Productive Struggle affects not only those of us running the lab, but also our members, students and event participants. We tell people that the software and machines make it possible for all people to be able to make almost anything, but “you have to be willing to learn new things.” That’s what Productive Struggle does, teaches us new things after a bout of struggle.  

The young participants in the recent week-long Fab Lab ICC/Greenbush Boot Camps learned of another form of Productive Struggle. We hosted up to 24 kids at a time with two teachers and two volunteers along with Tim and I. We couldn’t answer the questions fast enough so some of the campers had to learn to figure things out on their own and not be dependent on someone else; that’s a good thing. 

In the end, if we have the right mindset, Productive Struggle is a very good learning tool providing lasting lessons about how things in the real world work. When we mess something up and have to learn what to do to fix it, we learn and retain much more than if a teacher tried to tell us the right way in the first place. By the way, the teachers often don’t know the right way. While running a Fab Lab is a Productive Struggle in and of itself, we share the boosts in self-efficacy with all of our members and participants, the overall experience a  great benefit to all of us.