A shifting mosaic of student feelings: Experiences within and reflections toward productive failure and productive success designs

Productive Failure (PF) asks students to engage with complex, open-ended problems before formal instruction -embedding "failure" as a design feature.Despite PF's learning benefits, students' emotional experiences across its components remain understudied.Emotion surveys and interviews in an undergraduate data visualization course revealed consistently higher frustration in PF than Productive Success (PS), decreased enjoyment during solution revelation, and interview themes of discomfort, valued struggle, and preference for PF as a strategic supplement.