Welcome to the Blog of the THA Honors Seminar 2026. Our Honors Seminar focuses on “Failing Forward: The Power of Mistakes”. This seminar brings together selected outstanding students and motivated professors or lecturers from various disciplines to explore the power of mistakes in different contexts.
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Thirteen Weeks, One Wall, and Everything That Stuck
Blog: June 23th 2026 – The Last Week of the Honors Seminar 2026 Authors: Marina Corso, İbrahim Dağ Okay, let’s be honest: What do you actually remember from a semester? Not the slides. Not the exact wording of any theory. You remember the moment someone almost fainted. You remember the professor who unexpectedly said, “So,…
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Logic in Everyday Life and Mistakes in Mathematics & Technology Alone Doesn’t Create Value
Blog: June 16th 2026Lecturers: Prof. Dr. Caroline Justen, Mathematics & Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Jana Görmer-Redding, Computer ScienceAuthors: Julian Brune, Lora Kortes Veggies first, Ice Cream second? Imagine your mother telling you: “If you eat your vegetables, then you will get ice cream.” What would your thoughts be in this scenario?Is it, yay Ice Cream! 🙂…
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Win a LEGO Set: Why Failure Might Be Your Brain’s Best Feature – and How to Build a Fail-Safe System.
Professors: Prof. Dr. -Ing Alexandra Teynor & Prof. Dr. Barbara Eschner Authors: Sebastian Wolk & Felix Pfeifer Date: June 9, 2026 Session: THA Honors Seminar 2026 — Failing Forward Hint: You can win a Lego set! Chapter 1: Most IT-Projects Never Made It! Imagine you’re building a house. You draw the blueprints, buy the timber,…
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What If Failure Is the Beginning?
On learning organisations, perfect imperfection and why vulnerability is not a weakness By Ayla Kaya & Stefanie Setzer · May 19th, 2026 · Prof. Dr. Sarah Hatfield & Prof. Dr. Peter Cocron Let’s be honest. This blog post is being written two weeks after the session. No notes. No recordings. Just vibes, vague memories and the faint…
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Mistakes Set In Stone
Blog: June 2nd 2026 Construction Defects – Amusing and/ or Consequential?Lecturer: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Elisabeth Krön, Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering Authors: Carolina Otto, Eric Hartmann Have you ever walked into a room and noticed a mistake so absurd you just had to laugh? A floor texture changing right in the middle of the room,…
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The World May Compute Itself Better than any Model of it
Blog: May 13th 2026 (Un)Control Lecturer: Prof. Andreas Muxel, Faculty of Design Authors: Carmen Goy, Runa Wolf “I have everything under control at all times” might not be a sentence most of us ever say with confidence. But when we ask ourselves whether humanity has the ability to completely control its environment, many would argue…
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A Round Trip through the Cultural Dimensions of Mistakes
Blog: May 5th 2026 Understanding Mistakes Across Cultures: From Classrooms to Entrepreneurships Alisa Kasle-Henke Lecturer for Business English Communication and Cross-Cultural Management at the School of Business and the Language Center ZSI Authors: Tanja Rohrmayr, Clara Springer, Beisyth Yepes In the first part of the previous Honors Seminar class, Alisa Kasle-Henke, Lecturer for Business English…
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LEAN – Mistakes are more than a Mistake!
Professor: Florian HörmannAuthors: Syeda Raza E Zehra, Tobias SterkDate: 28.05.2026 Introduction Imagine for a moment you are attending a seminar session, and suddenly you see a student with bloody hand looking like he is about to faint. You feel your stomach drop. The professor sprints over to the student shouting for first aid kit. Someone…
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Lera mika-ke soma & Tami keri-ni
“My brain is not braining anymore!” – this phrase accompanied our attempts to uncover the secrets of the fictional language Naro. The challenge of learning a completely new language as adults vividly demonstrated the difference between child language acquisition and the conscious cognitive engagement with grammatical structures. In this session, we did not only talk about…
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From Failure to Everyday Essential: Why “Wrong” Ideas Sometimes Win
Blog: April 14th 2026 What do Post-it Notes, Viagra, Bubble Wrap, Listerine, and Play-Doh have in common? At first glance, absolutely nothing, except that everyone knows them. But their real connection is far more surprising: They all failed before they succeeded. Or at least, they failed at what they were originally meant to be.This raises…
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The Weight of Mistakes
Mistakes happen constantly, everywhere and to everyone. But what happens when a mistake is more than just a small slip? When it leaves a mark, hurts others, or changes a life entirely? Mistakes affect not only the person acting, but those who must bear the outcome. On March 31, 2026, we focused on this very…
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What do bugs and mistakes have in common?
Blog: March 24th 2026 – Second Week of Honors Seminar If there’s one thing today’s seminar, led by Prof. Dr. Claudia Meitinger from the Electrical Engineering Department made clear, it is that mistakes are not just little accidents we try to avoid, but they can be the main characters of a whole story. In the…
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Reframing Failure – Together
Failing Forward Blog: March 17th 2026 – First Week Honors Seminar 7,500. That’s roughly the amount of students studying at the THA. And while the subjects we study and our personal backgrounds might vary, we still succeed in finding common grounds. Some things might be obvious, such as sharing the same facilities and being taught…