The first time I built something that actually worked — a small program in one of my computer science courses at the University of Missouri — I learned more in those few hours than I had in weeks of lecture. The act of building forced me to confront every gap in my understanding, every assumption that turned out to be wrong, every detail I'd skipped over. Reading about the concepts had let me feel like I knew them. Building something exposed how much I didn't.
That experience is the heart of invention-based learning.
How Invention-based Learning Works
Invention-based learning is a structured approach where students learn by being asked to invent solutions to real or simulated problems, often before they're formally taught the underlying concepts. The order is the unusual part. Traditional teaching introduces the concept first and then asks students to apply it. Invention-based learning flips that — students try to invent a solution first, struggle with it, and then learn the formal concept as a way to understand what they just did (or failed to do).
Researchers like Daniel Schwartz at Stanford have published extensive work on what's sometimes called "productive failure" — the finding that students who try and fail at solving a novel problem before being taught the formal solution actually learn the formal solution more deeply than students who are taught it first. The struggle creates a kind of cognitive readiness that lectures alone don't.
The reason this works comes down to a basic truth about how the brain learns: we encode new information in relation to what we're already wrestling with. A formula that's introduced cold is just abstract noise. The same formula introduced after you've spent twenty minutes trying to invent your own version of it lands very differently. You have somewhere to put it. It answers a question you've actually been asking.
What I've Seen Invention-based Learning Do
When I designed Products: The Card Game, I made a deliberate choice not to teach players anything before they started playing. No tutorial on pitching. No frameworks for value propositions. No lecture on what makes a good product. Players are just dropped into the game and asked to invent. They struggle in the first round. They figure things out by the third. By the time the game ends, they've absorbed an entire informal curriculum on entrepreneurial pitching — without anyone ever lecturing them on it.
I've watched this play out in college classrooms, family game nights, corporate training sessions, and in classrooms run by teachers in schools across the country I've worked with. The dynamic is always the same. Players who started uncomfortable and unsure end the session asking, "wait, can we play one more round?" They didn't realize they were learning. That's exactly the design.
This connects directly to my broader thinking on learning by doing and experiential learning. Invention-based learning is what you get when you take those principles and add a specific structural commitment: have students try the thing before you teach the thing. It's also closely related to invention education, with which it shares an emphasis on student-generated work over delivered content.
If you're a teacher or curriculum designer thinking about bringing invention-based learning into your work, my honest recommendation is to start small. Pick one concept you'd normally explain for ten minutes. Instead, design a five-minute activity where students have to figure out a version of it themselves. Watch what happens. The first few times will feel chaotic. That chaos is the learning.
The biggest mental shift this approach requires from teachers is patience. The temptation, when students are struggling with an invention task, is to step in and explain. Resist that. The struggle is where the learning lives. Once you've watched a student wrestle with a problem and then, twenty minutes later, light up when the formal concept clicks into place, you'll never go back to lecturing first.
That's been my experience, anyway. And it's why I'll keep building things — both products and curriculum — around this principle.
About the Author
Aaron Heienickle is the founder of Skypig and the creator of Products: The Card Game, a hands-on entrepreneurship game played in classrooms, family game nights, and corporate offsites across the country.
He started Skypig his senior year of high school and has been building it ever since. Aaron studied Marketing and Computer Science at the University of Missouri and is a regular at Missouri Startup Weekend, one of the largest pitch competitions in the state.
Through Skypig, Aaron has worked with educators, students, and corporate teams to bring entrepreneurship to life through doing — not just discussing. Learn more about Aaron.