Productive struggle and simulation design: actionable insights for designing engaging simulations

Aristotle’s quote ‘For the things we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them’ captures a fundamental value of simulation-based education – learning through experience. Practising tasks before mastering them is an essential experience for many learners and underscores the value of struggle as integral to the learning process. In this regard, there is a strong synergy between simulation-based education and the principles of productive struggle. Both incorporate concepts of guided discovery, preparation for future learning and adaptive expertise. In productive struggle, learners first attempt to solve a problem before being provided with a correct or canonical solution, allowing them to compare and refine their understanding. Simulation-based learning emphasizes active discovery in the learning process, problem solving, skills development and deeper conceptual understanding. In this essay, we introduce the main features of productive struggle as an instructional approach and its value as a theoretical lens for simulation education design.