Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is being hailed as the biggest film event of the summer, proving that the story still resonates nearly 3,000 years after Homer first told it. For over a millennium, audiences have been captivated by legendary monsters, impossible obstacles, and the long journey of a hero determined to find his way home.

At Rosie, we see something more.

Beneath the mythical creatures and heroic feats is a timeless lesson in how we as humans learn, grow, and become capable of accomplishing things we once thought were impossible.

In other words, The Odyssey may be one of history’s earliest lessons in productive struggle.

Odysseus didn’t simply overcome obstacles because he was naturally gifted or always knew the answers. He isn’t remembered because things went well. He’s remembered because they didn’t, and he figured it out anyway. He made mistakes. His plans failed. He got lost.

But by the time he finally made it home, he wasn’t just someone who survived an extraordinary journey. He was someone who had been changed by it. And that may be the story’s greatest message: growth doesn’t happen after struggle. It happens through it.

Sound familiar?

Productive Struggle Is the Whole Point

At Rosie Riveters, we believe every child deserves the opportunity to experience that kind of growth, and we see it every day through hands-on STEM learning.

A robot doesn’t move on the first try. A circuit doesn’t work. A solution that seemed perfect turns out to need another attempt. Those moments are frustrating, but they’re also where the deepest learning happens.

It’s not failure for its own sake. It’s not challenge without support. It’s the experience of encountering something hard, sticking with it, and finding a way through. Because actually doing the cognitive work of struggling through something difficult builds those skills that can’t be automated or replaced.

Critical thinking. Problem-solving. Confidence. Adaptability.

Productive struggle isn’t about making learning harder. It’s about creating opportunities for students to wrestle with meaningful challenges in an environment where it’s safe to make mistakes, ask questions, rethink their approach, and try again.

Those moments don’t just teach STEM. They build confident learners.

Brittany Greer recently explored this idea on the Mavens of Manufacturing podcast with Meaghan Ziemba, discussing why productive struggle is so foundational to building the talent pipeline. One of the biggest takeaways was that workforce readiness begins much earlier than job training.

Why K-12 Is Crucial

We know that kids form beliefs about themselves, their capabilities, and the spaces they belong in well before attending their first career fair or choosing their college major. When employers ask why there are talent gaps in the incoming STEM workforce, the answer is that they were already developing a decade ago in the classroom.

The reason we root our programs in productive struggle isn’t philosophical. It’s practical. Curiosity isn’t something children either have or don’t. It’s a muscle, and it needs resistance to grow.

Hands-on STEM experiences build the conditions for curiosity to become a habit. A child who learns to sit with uncertainty and say “I may not know, but I can figure it out” is learning something that will serve them in any field, in any decade, in a landscape that’s still being defined.

Kids today are growing up in a world where the most powerful tools humanity has ever built are at their fingertips, and whether they use them to expand their thinking or replace it depends entirely on how they’ve learned to approach a challenge.

Students who’ve practiced productive struggle have the judgment, confidence, and curiosity to be collaborators rather than just consumers. Those who haven’t learned to outsource their thinking, and tools can only take you as far as your thinking goes.

It Takes an Army

Although we tend to focus on the hero, Odysseus’s journey is also shaped by the people who guide, encourage, challenge, and believe in him along the way.

The same is true for every child. Students don’t build confidence because we remove every obstacle from their path. They build it because parents, educators, mentors, volunteers, and communities create environments where it’s safe to get things wrong before getting them right.

Every child deserves access to those environments, not just the ones in well-resourced districts or whose parents know where to look. Our mission has always been to expand that access, and we can’t do it alone.

It takes all of us working together to build the infrastructure that makes the journey possible.

The Hero’s Journey Starts Now

The Odyssey endures because its lessons are fundamentally true: struggle produces growth, persistence shapes character, and no one finds their way without a little help.

Again and again, Odysseus encounters situations where there isn’t an obvious answer, and he must adapt and get creative to figure them out. Each challenge prepares him for the next, each setback makes him more resourceful, and each mistake shapes the leader he becomes.

We want the same thing for every child.

Our job as educators, community members, and advocates is not to eliminate challenge, but to ensure every challenge leaves them more capable than they were before.

This summer, audiences will undoubtedly leave theaters buzzing about breathtaking adventure and one of literature’s greatest heroes.

We hope they’ll also remember the message at the heart of the story.

The lasting power of The Odyssey isn’t that heroes conquer every obstacle, but that they become heroes by encountering those obstacles in the first place.