When a child first rides a bike, everyone knows they will fall. The fall is part of the lesson, and the lesson lasts a lifetime. Can we say the same about engineering education? What if we built an engineering experience that rewarded the very curiosity that makes this discipline the innovation engine of the future? Failure-Is-Fun, winner of the 2026 GEDC Transformative Engineering Award, flips the lesson. Launched at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing in 2025, the initiative treats failure as curriculum: an asset-based, identity-centered practice that builds the confidence and persistence first-year engineers need to stay, and the joy they need to thrive.
This is not a lecture. It is an engagement strategy, and the audience is part of it. Participants will build their own Failure CV alongside colleagues across the globe, see what happened when Failure-Is-Fun, designed and led by Mason’s Office of Outreach, Student Success & Engagement, reached 1,480 students in under two years (fear of failure down from 91 percent to 29 percent, persistence into the second year at 94 percent, and an international award on the program’s first entry), and leave with one practice chosen and the encouragement to try it. The practices behind the numbers, the Failure CV, storytelling circles, failure-positive feedback, and a Fail-A-Thon that turns a hackathon on its head, need no new budget and no permission. They scale from a section of thirty to a cohort of three hundred, in a fixed curriculum or a flexible one. The change engineering education needs is not expensive. It starts with the next class you teach. Come ready to type.
Presenter:
Dr. Christopher A. Carr
Dr. Christopher A. Carr is Associate Dean for Outreach, Student Success & Engagement at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, one of the most diverse engineering colleges in the United States, where he leads programming serving more than 12,000 students a year. He is the architect of Failure-Is-Fun, developed with his colleague Christi Wilcox and winner of the Global Engineering Deans Council’s 2026 Transformative Engineering Award, presented at the World Engineering Education Forum in Cartagena. His scholarship centers on Critical Joy Pedagogy, an asset-based framework that treats the lived experience of first-generation and underrepresented students as engineering expertise rather than deficit, and on engineers as democratic architects, the subject of his 2026–27 Visiting Fellowship at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Carr is First Vice President of the American Society for Engineering Education and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Black Excellence in Engineering, Science, and Technology. He has presented on engineering education at the World Engineering Education Forum in Sydney and Cartagena, IEEE EDUCON in London, and LACCEI, and previously served as Chief Academic and Program Officer of the National Society of Black Engineers and as Senior Adviser to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A first-generation college graduate from Kansas City, he holds an Ed.D. from Creighton University and an M.P.P. from Pepperdine University.