Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I have been thinking to myself (and debating with others) the value of failure vs. the value of success. I don't think that anybody will question that both hold great value in the learning process for students and mentors alike. What I've been asking is how do we as mentors balance these methods of learning? Mentors generally have the power to intervene in students' struggles and take away the lessons that can be learned from failure, but at the same time, save the student from frustration and give them a new skill with which they can create bigger and more exciting problems to be solved. Obviously there is no "correct", one-size-fits-all answer, but there are surely more successful, and less successful methods.

Here is my take on the issue:
My parents tell me that I am supposed to go to the boy's bathroom and guide me through the process. I successfully do it over and over and never have an issue. I have succeeded in learning which bathroom to use: value in success.
But maybe one day I'm tired, or knowing me, not paying full attention and I mistakenly walk into the girls bathroom :yikes: (something I'd be willing to bet most of us have done). The embarrassment and humiliation will cause me never to forget to check the sign before walking into the bathroom: value in failure.

Long story short, value that comes from success is generally easy to come by when it's handed to you, but the value that comes from failure has a more permanent and lasting effect.

On the other hand:
The strategy team is debating what direction the team should go for the year and has hit a major road block. They can't figure out what to do and the argument is getting heated. Mentor William Beatty has this great game-breaking idea that he proposes to the students. They can all now move on and begin implementing the idea: value in success.
Meanwhile many other teams who resent mentor-built-robots allow the students to debate until their voices are hoarse. After a week or two they finally agree and have a student crafted strategy. They end the year as an average team and all agree the students need to be quicker in deciding the strategy next year: value in failure.

Long story short, value that comes from failure takes more time and often leads to fewer new discoveries and experiences (less build time and prototyping time in the above example). Value from success often allows for more and greater success and failure opportunities since it can be done in a quick way.

So basically I typed all that to say I have no idea how to balance out success and failure. I think this is a question that every mentor and team should answer for themselves. I also think it is a question that drives a lot of the mentor-built vs. student-built debate (please don't let it turn into one of those). As a mentor going into my second year, and trying to be the most effective mentor that I can, I'd be really interested to hear how others have answered this question for themselves in the past.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Interesting topic.
I'll add a personal example:
In 2012, we went to the Granite State Regional in New Hamshire during Week 1. We couldn't shoot accurately or even lower a bridge correctly. We ended up not getting picked at a regional. We realized through this experience that the robot needed some major retooling to succeed- Value in Failure.

A few weeks later, we attended the Connecticut Regional. Our shot accuracy wasn't much better the first day, but our bridge lowering and balancing was much better, and that night we decided to switch strategies and become a feeder robot. We ended up getting selected by 195 and 181 and winning the Connecticut Regional. Through this, we learned that a role player could be valuable. Value in Success.

We then attended the Championship event in the Archimedes division. I got a chance to watch the amazing 2012 Archimedes final matches, some of the best matches ever in FRC history. I got to look at 67's robot up close and I said "Wow, that robot is so much simpler than ours." Through looking at their robot (as well as a few others), I learned the value of simplicity and elegance in robot design. This is value from neither success nor failure- I'd call it Value in Inspiration.

I think teams can use all of these, and they're all effective means of gaining value from the FIRST Program.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

While I can't answer some parts of your questions, I'll talk a bit about success, failure, and how humans learn from both.

The former and late President of India, Abdul Kalam, viewed the word "fail" as an acronym: First Attempt In Learning. (Most of the time failure is a first attempt in learning). Just something I thought I would throw out there. Humans tend to learn more from failure because after experiencing failure, their mindset can change. The likelihood is more higher if they experience failure that they will learn from it and work harder towards succeeding at what they failed at. Example: A student bombs a Physics unit test and is overwhelmed by the material on the test. The likelihood is high that this student will work twice as harder to suceed on the next unit test. Also, failure must be taken positively. Smile and work hard towards reforming your mistakes.

Success is a whole other story. A lot can be learned from sucess, but I still think a student who fails learns more than a student that suceeds. Part of it is the students mindset, but I'll give an example anyway: A student aces his Physics test and thinks the material is super easy. The student possibly may slack a bit (study wise) for the next unit, because he is under the impression that the material is easy. Sucess sometimes may influence a humans mindset like shown in the example above, success sometimes changes the mindset of the student negatively (for example: "This material is so easy, I don't even have to study for it", I'm particularly guilty of that as most high school students who breeze through high school are). The example and thoughts I provided about success aren't particularly true if you stick to a positive attitude and hard working mindset, regardless of positive results.

I think balancing it is a great idea, both success and failure should be experienced by every FIRST student.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

According to this, with the amount of failure my team has had we should be amazing by now. </joke>

All kidding aside, I definitely agree that failure propels us to improve. The worst season for my team since we were founded in 1999 was 2014, when we couldn't even pick up the ball and our drive train didn't work for half our matches (we did a 4 traction wheel, 1 CIM per wheel drive; bad idea). Then this past season (2015), we realized we need to step up our game, and we made the best robot we have ever made (arguably, but supported by most). We almost made it to Champs, missing it by about 10 points.

Hopefully our success last year will propel us to improve next year as much as our failure did the previous year. If we continue on our path of improvement, I see a Championship attendance in our future. Here's hopeful.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I'm going into my junior year of high school and we just had to read a book sorta like this, "The Triple Package". The book discusses why different ethnic and religious groups in America succeed or fail. Throughout the book the author discusses how the three parts to being successful are
1. Superiority complex
2. Insecurity
3. Impulse Control
The first 2 seem conflicting however they play off of each other.
For example, your team wins your division at champs but gets knocked out on Einstein. This scenario creates the perfect balance you need for learning. In this scenario, your team creates a superiority complex by knowing they are the best in their division however still are insecure after losing on Einstein. These 2 parts foster innovation in the future. If you were to flawlessly win in both your division and on Einstein you wouldn't have that chip on your shoulder to do better next year, you would become relaxed. Meanwhile, the team that got knocked out on Einstein will innovate to try and ensure that doesn't happen again.

1678 is a team that fits this situation. Every year they come out with a great robot and make it onto Einstein and just barely miss the win. Then after years of innovation they manage to win and be on top.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

This is something that we've actually talked a bit about, as mentors, on my team. We feel that there definitely is value in failure, and it's both a great teaching tool and a part of the Engineering process - even someone was well known as Edison took thousands of failed attempts before he created a commercially viable lightbulb. But even though there's value in failure, we can't ignore the value of success. Repeated and prolonged failure can be discouraging and take away from the inspiration we're all trying to impart. So it's important to have some success mixed in as well.

So, with my team we always try to ensure the students have a successful year. That doesn't mean we go to champs every year, or that we define success by playing on Einstein. A successful year is something you feel in the atmosphere in your teams pit. It's an excitement and hope for the future. You can have that even if your ranked poorly, and likewise you can miss it even if your ranked highly. The key is to set realistic, achievable goals that stretch the team just a bit.

From a practical standpoint, this means that during the build season we let them fail at various things that are correctable. We try our best to ensure they don't do something totally off the wall that will set us back several weeks. But if they cut something too short or drill a hole in the wrong place it's just material - there's more sitting in the corner and they can try again. Likewise if they haven't thought through a design far enough to see the upcoming problems, then we have. We talk A LOT about how we're going to be solving the problems they'll run into next week. A lot of the time, we can be ready with an easy solution to help them get around the problem when they realize it (a solution that is only provided after they've come up with ideas and are still struggling)... Sometimes we don't see a solution to the problem, so we raise the issue earlier to get them thinking about it, and to avoid spending too much time going down a path that isn't going to work.

Don't let anyone fool you - being a mentor is hard. It's hard to manage a teams expectations, abilities, and failures to ensure a n overall successful season, however you define that success... And that definition may be different each year as the teams situation changes, and is largely guided by the expectations you help to manage. But it's also a lot of fun :)

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

This makes me scared to see 2826 next year. :ahh:

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

We had similar experiences in 2013.

At the wisconsin regional, we were in the lower 20 in terms of scoring. Yet, our unique shape and good driver allowed us to play brutal defense. We ended up being the 23rd overall pick, joining the second seed alliance with 1732 and 111, and got our first (and only) regional win. Through this, we realized that winning wasn't out of the question for our team, and that we might be able to shoot higher (literally)- value in success.

At midwest, we had made massive improvements to the robot. We were shooting into the higher goal, running more cycles per match, and shooting more consistently. We ended the event as the second seed, picking 111 and 1675. Mathematically, our alliance was the highest-scoring at the event, but we lost in semis because of broken parts and consistency problems. Learning from our mistakes, we returned from the event determined to make further improvements- value in failure.

At champs, we expected to be a second pick, if we were in elims at all. We knew the bot was by far the best one we had ever made, but we just didn't know if we'd make the cut. Yet, through some good strategy and a little luck, we ended up being the 7th seeded alliance captain. Even though we didn't make it past quarters, we were excited to even have been there, let alone be an alliance captain- value in success.

I could keep going, but 2014 in a nutshell was a lesson in failure and 2015 in a nutshell was a lesson in success. (at the end, at least) I have always felt that our failures have driven us to improve in the short term, while repeated failures encouraged long-term improvements. However, the value of success is how winning inspires a team to keep getting better. It provides a sense of identity and a sense of direction.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

[emphasis mine] From a similar experience (winning our first ever award in 2009), I'd say this is the most valuable thing to be gained from a taste of success rather than full-on failure. Failure can be motivating, but only if you believe you can succeed if you do what you're being motivated to. Maybe not a thing teams on CD disproportionately struggle with (anymore), but even so it's wise to be on the lookout for demotivation as we try to strike the balance.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Interesting to see that so far, success and failure has been defined by blue banners in this thread. In one case, being picked 23rd was considered a better success than being the 2nd alliance captain because of the final result.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Agreed.

"Fail Faster" is a motto I use often. Do you think 254 wins on the field because their team never fails? No, they just failed 100 times on their practice field, versus your 10 failures on your practice field. By the time you are at your first event, there's still 90 ways your team could fail that 254 has already identified, corrected for, and moved past.

Failure is a critical component of success. I encourage students to fail as fast as possible. Build faster, test faster, fail in the off season, fail in your prototyping, test auto until it fails, crash your scouting system, etc. Fail as often as you can when it doesn't count to increase your chance of success when it does count.

In an education culture that hinges on having the perfect grades and perfect SAT scores to get into the perfect colleges, I enjoy providing an environment where students are encouraged to test their own hypothesis, challenge their assumptions, and regularly fail. I also enjoy celebrating their victories that come from working through failure (both small and large victories).

-Mike

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I encourage you to think about your question differently. I believe that the best quality we, as mentors, can instill in students and each other is a passion for excellence.

“There are many people, particularly in sports, who think that success and excellence are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person's control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually. People who put excellence in the first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he is threatened by the success of others and he resents real excellence. In contrast, the person that is fascinated by quality is excited when he sees it in others.”
― Joe Paterno

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I'm a student, so I can't really answer the OP's question, but I thought it was interesting so started thinking about it.

For everything below, I'm going to define success in terms of on-field success (i.e. how well a team's robot works). Not necessarily winning the event, but having a competitive robot and the potential to win. Similarly, I define failure not as being a finalist or making a few mistakes at competition, but not being a competitor at all.

Inspiration
We've all heard it: FIRST is about inspiration. For some students, failure will be inspiring. They prefer to just try things out and see from themselves what comes out of it. However, I believe that for most, success will be more so. Telling someone "you can do this" versus "you might be able to do this" sends a stronger message. It really varies by person though--I have friends on all sides of this issue.

But I think there is a danger with failure. If you're successful, at worst students will be indifferent. If you're not, they might learn that "this is hard" or "I can't do this" and no longer want to go into engineering / STEM / etc.

There's also the possibility of a greater impact with success. Successful teams have the power to inspire not only their own students, but students around the world. I've been pushed by what I've designed and built to do better next time, but seeing other teams' robots has inspired me more than anything else, and given me a goal to push towards.

There is definitely a power in failure. I just don't think competition is the place to do so. And not to the extent that I've defined it as. Learning from mistakes, testing out ideas that don't work, and "failing" during prototyping is great. Just keep it all in context. Failure as a motivation to do better helps; failure as an end does not.

Learning
I think the question was more focused on whether you learn more from success or failure. Again, I think it's both. If you never lose, you never learn why you need to try hard. If you never win, you never learn why you are trying hard.

For more specific lessons, such as the original example about developing a strategy, I think the lessons will be more ingrained if they come from failure. A couple of friends and I came up with a list of "things we are never putting on our robot again." (Mainly rope, especially when used to move stuff.) Had we not used them in the first place, and just been told it wouldn't work, we might never have understood why not to. But the lesson came with a price. Here it was just that we had to deal with rope for one season. It could have been much more, and seriously affected points above.

This may not be the best example because the rope wasn't something we were warned against, but the only solution anyone could come up with. There were mentors who helped with it.

I believe the strongest lesson a mentor can teach is how to succeed. It can come by guiding students through the process, letting them experiment themselves, or some combination of the two. It will really depend on the team, and what the mentors / students believe.

In the end
I think I've rambled on enough...in the end, what I'd say is to show students how to succeed, but make sure they understand why. Use the offseason and prototyping as a time to try out all sorts of ideas and see what does and doesn't work. Don't let it come at the price of failure at competition, but that doesn't mean to not experiment.

And it'd vary by teams. What mentors are / are not able or willing to do, what students want / don't want to do, and everything else. The best balance is what both groups compromise on and believe is best for the team as a whole.

Random thoughts
This is an interesting point. There are many people who don't believe in mentor-run, but who are fine with other teams doing whatever they think is best. (i.e. "you inspire your way.") I've always believed that people who actually resent mentor-built robots / mentor-run teams are those who are jealous of their success or frustrated with their own failure. I guess that's another danger of failing: putting down those who are more successful in order to make yourself feel better. It's another lesson I think mentors should be teaching students: how to avoid that thinking, and how to cope with failure because at some point, everyone will experience it.

(I'm not trying to get into a mentor-run/built debate; I just wanted to respond to that.)


Wow, that was long...

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Blue banners are a way to define success, because it's what we aim for. No one is trying to lose in finals.

Also I think the picked 23rd>2nd captain was because they qualified for champs when they were picked 23rd, and then did very well at champs, becoming an alliance captain.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

While there is definite value in each style of teaching and learning, I prefer to take an approach where I demonstrate and teach successful methods before allowing students to proceed down a road of failure. In FRC specifically, failure can be disastrous, and there is often limited time in which success cannot be realized after a catastrophic failure. In the workshop, failure can be expensive, and even life-threatening.

A problematic dynamic and culture becomes apparent when failure persists for such a duration and reoccurs so frequently that students begin to accept it as the norm, and never learn the proper way to do things.

If you look at Team 696 pre-2012 and post-2012, you'll see a clear difference. That was the year in which we decided as a team, we are going to do things the right way, and learn how to do things the right way, and teach each other how to do things the right way, and take some sense of pride in our work and hold high standards of quality in everything we do. It has drastically transformed our robots, our students, our lab, and the way we work. Whodathunk?

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Just as an example of what we have tried, we often do small projects in the off-season that are completely open to student failure, and then offer more guidance and try to deflect failure more during the season or in "large scale" off-season projects.

For instance, last year we did a t-shirt cannon competition where we built 3 teams and had them compete to build the strongest / fastest cannon. The teams were entirely student led with mentors only helping when specifically asked. Rather than mentors constantly offering guidance or trying to foster ideas, we made our involvement entirely up to the students. As a result very few groups came to us for help and only one group was ultimately able to build a cannon that shot more than 10 feet.
Afterwards we had a debrief on what went right with that one team and what went wrong with the others. It was mostly due to one or two students putting in a lot of work researching build techniques and making their mistakes early in the process.

We don't think that the massive 2+ month FRC season is a useful place to let the students fail if we can prevent it. But a short small scale project lets them fail in a more low-key environment and a good post-analysis helps them uncover what caused that failure and how they could prevent it.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

As a mentor/coach/teacher I think it is incorrect to choose or let someone fail. Instead we should do our best to give them the correct tools or suggestions to succeed. Teams can then move to bigger and better problems as a whole group.

I like Corsetto's fail faster approach, and to answer the op's question: Failures come often enough that we don't need to create them or let them continue when discovered.

The question I ask is: what are you going to do when you fail? I fail all the time and you are going to fail; there is no doubt about it, no one is perfect. Are you going to try another method, fix the problem, find a solution, or let it take you down?

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

You don't want people to fail. You don't won't airplanes to fail. You do want to teach how to take appropriate risks. Taking risks will lead to occasional failures. Successful people learn to accept failure and continue on. Successful people learn from their failures. Sometimes the only thing they learn is that what they was trying was a really bad idea. Prototypes that don't work aren't necessarily failures.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

This example illustrates a different lesson: the value of institutional knowledge and wisdom. It's the real reason why we have mentors. Students can have great ideas, but with a 6-week deadline, we all need to pare branches of decisions. A mentor's role at least in part is to say "we tried that before you were here and it didn't work." And what do students learn from that? A lesson often lost in this Internet age when everyone thinks they can become an instant expert thanks to Google--that an older individual with wisdom can have an important role. What a mentor has to do is watch for overstepping the bounds on original creativity.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

The question here is whether it's good for students in a FIRST environment to have an entire season as a "prototype failure". I would be floored if you found an FRC mentor arugeing students that should be barred from iterative development. Rather, "failure" in this context means the opposite of iteration.

Look at the OP example: The "value in success" example is 71. They succeeded because they failed and iterated upon it. The "value in failure" question comes only when when students are [at risk of] carrying a single failure for an entire season (or longer), e.g. poor strategy resulting in limited opportunities to fail/learn/be inspired in follow-on experiences. We want our students to be successful people and learn from failures, but how do they become successful enough to recognize and handle failure properly? Do they make every mistake to its fullest, or to what extent should mentors facilitate learning from others' previous mistakes (share their experience and knowledge).

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

This is the core of a discussion my team has been having regarding our direction: Education vs Inspiration.

My opinion has been that teams that succeed are generally better at inspiration than those who don't, and if the goal of a team is to inspire, then it should be the goal to succeed even if success is sometimes at the expense of some education.

Consequently, it could perhaps be argued that students on a team that has their robots parts built by their sponsor and assembled by their mentors don't learn as much about the process, but if that robot is successful, aren't those students more likely to pursue STEM than students on a team whose robot was not successful?

I don't think there is too much unique about the technical skills used to build a FIRST robot that you couldn't learn how to do it at the college level, but if you don't choose to pursue a STEM field in the first place, what is the point of learning the skills at all?

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I am a firm believer in the high value of Success after failure.

All too often the "learn more from failure" seems like the nice thing to say after something pretty bad goes on. From a value perspective, I would actually say, that you learn more from 1 success than 1 failure. IE, if I try something that works, I have found something that works (which is valuable piece of knowledge). If I try only one thing that fails, then I only know that one failure point.
Now, if I get the chance to dig in, and learn why something failed, and then turn it into a success... that has a lot of value in my mind.

Of course, learning how to "do soemthing the right way" that leads to success... that can be priceless.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

For some reason your post made me think of something that popped up on my Facebook news feed a while ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...m-solving.html

I recommend giving it a try before reading on, or the whole thing will be spoiled :)

Basically, it deals with a question of confirmation bias. In trying to find out the rule the number sequence follows, a surprisingly large number of people will only out in sequences they think follow the rule - get a bunch of "yes" and your assumption at least fits the rule, although it may not match the rule.

For me, I went almost the exact opposite when I tried it - I tried to get failures. I put in number sequences specifically to rule out possibilities, and the more failures I got the more I knew about the parameters of the rule.

Taking this to the team... Failure and iteration can help you to explore many different paths and define the full parameters of success for a robot. Building something that happens to be successful right off the bat is nice, but can lead to more narrow thinking about what success looks like, as you haven't tried other things that went in other directions.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I agree with this. Any non-trivial real-world problem has a much larger space of non-solutions than it has solutions. This is why we apply our knowledge about science and engineering - to test promising solutions early on in hope of a success, so we can better characterize our problem to come up with the next potential solution, and so on.

To have any hope of understanding any reasonable complex problem domain, you need to experience both successes and failures. Without (repeatedly, constantly) experiencing both, you'll never understand what the difference is. This goes for engineering and non-engineering problems (e.g. "life").

Given how integral finding success is to understanding complex problem domains (and therefore inspiration), I never intentionally "let students fail" in FRC. There will inevitably be enough unintentional failure in any endeavor we take on that adding intentional failure on top of that seems unnecessary.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I have worked with a few "over-confident" students and let them intentionally fail (in a safe manner, and in time that corrections could be made) in order to do a bit of an ego check. This was actually a good thing (as far as I can tell) for them, and we got to a working solution later on.

I also have intentionally let students do something I thought would fail... but it turns out worked pretty well.

During 2011, I ate a nice piece of crow when one of the students talked about using magnetic arms to latch onto the pole. I said, "any solution that requires magnets is likely as sound as using hope as a strategy" (or somethign to that effect). We had a magnetic runner/clinger wheel 2 weeks later, and eventually had the non-contact magnet and ramp design by end of season.... The kids really should have heckled me more about that one.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I would reword this a little bit, its more of a process. Instead of taking appropriate risks, engineering is about identifying risks and mitigating them. Once the criteria are defined, such as a strategy in FRC, ideas are created for solving them. Those ideas should have their risks identified and them gone through the engineering process to eliminate or reduce. If they can't be eliminated analytically, they need to be tested conservatively and eliminated that way. So from a technical standpoint, its not about taking risks, but more about identifying them (which is the hardest part) and reducing them. Without the initial engineering, many prototypes are setup for failure and go through the shotgun approach with hope of finding a solution. With time in FRC and available people, sometimes the analysis gets short changed, but people can be amazed at how much time can be saved with some basic physics calculations. I don't think any ideas are bad, but they must be sorted through to get to the best solution.

Maybe this is from my aerospace background, but we don't take risks, and if anything is in question, we conservatively test it to ensure reliability. Now that doesn't mean there aren't failures during development, but that is what development and prototyping is for, reducing risk.

This is what I was trying to imply in my first post, Jared has explained it more elegantly.

To me the OP's question is the following: Which methodology is better from a mentor perspective? Learning by teaching through success, or learning from teaching through failure? Is there a balance?

My answer still is to teach through success. Learning through failure may be effective, but it is long and time consuming compared to learning through success. Example: basketball coach gives a new kid a basketball and tells him to throw it at the hoop until it goes in. Versus basketball coach pulls the new kid aside for 10 minutes and explains how to use his legs and square up his elbow and finished with a good follow through. Which kids is going to learn faster? I just think the latter process gets everyone farther faster.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

I think I'm torn on this subject a little.

Based on the above comments, I have a question about allowing a student to fail. Is there any value in teaching humility through failure? I do my best to find a way to reach all of my students. Sometimes that is easy and sometimes it is more difficult.

A couple of years ago I had one particular student that I could not reach. He was very determined to do things his way after having come from another FRC team that was run very differently than ours and having participated in FRC from a very young age. He was determined to turn our team into his team and have everything his way... In the end, I let him take parts of the process into his own hands and it did not lead to success that year for us. It taught him a lesson that I don't think he would have learned had I put my foot down and said 'no' to him along the way.

To be clear, I'm not sure it was valuable for the entire team. I think it did more harm to the team than good to that one student. It has helped to make me a better mentor for seeing that though. Remember students, your mentors aren't perfect, we are human too.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Love this comment.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Teaching the line between success and failure is impossible if someone cannot perceive the difference between the two. Teaching them the hard way that their perceptions of success do not match reality can be a necessary first step, though I think in general there are multiple ways of doing so.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Failure can be a great and valuable learning experience, but this requires a few crucial mindsets and capabilities:

1) Introspection. You must firmly believe that your failure was due to factors (at least in significant part) under your control. Therefore, by doing something different, you might succeed. If you assign your failures to outside agents, then you really cannot productively learn from them.
2) Critical Analysis. Understanding the factors behind your failures, your shortfalls, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Understand how you might succeed and what changes you might make to your habits / processes to improve your prospects to succeed.
3) The will (and the physical/financial/temporal capability) to change what you do and the way you do it (your processes) in order to succeed.
4) The ability to inspire your team to make the necessary process changes that are needed for success.

I mentor a team which, during my early years of mentoring, was conspicuous for never winning anything. Our robots (and our processes) were bloody awful. This situation was very discouraging; to the point that it was difficult making a case for mentors to stay and sponsors to support us.

Our tipping point came in 2008 (Overdrive), where, frankly, our robot was so bad that it was undrivable. This led us to drastically change the way we worked. We started meeting year-round. We started a summer program to develop basic knowledge; initially to learn how to make competent drive trains; later to drive this competency into other areas. The inspiration for change was clearly failure-driven.

Our initial successes were small ones, but quick (2009, Lunacy): an engineering award; an off-season victory (as 2nd pick). Small successes. But for a team accustomed to never winning anything, these successes were enormously inspiring and reinforced the process changes we had started. We kept up our drive to improve. We still do.

Both Failure and Success can have enormous value, both from a standpoint of learning and inspiration. Much of the value depends upon how you internalize and utilize the experience.

Success, of course, also brings hazard. Of hubris and arrogance. Again, how you use these experiences generally determines the value.

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

REALLY LONG POST ALERT

Both have value.

Failure can be a powerful tool in areas that are less consequential to how well the team will do at competition- offseason projects, learning skills (like CAD, or how to scout a match correctly), that sort of thing. a failed season teaches a team something different- it (hopefully) catalyses change, allowing the team to fix whatever the failure was (over-extension, not listening to each other, not enough driving practice), fixing it for the next year.

Success is a good tool on the large scale- building a working robot that does what you wanted it to, winning a regional, being ranked higher than the previous year. A successful season has the danger of making a team complacent to keep running the team how it has been run, ignoring the skill of the students (either letting mentors control too much in an area which has a strong set of students- ex. being having the mentors decide most of the strategy, while leaving it up to the kids to design the robot, when the students are, as a whole more strategic minded and have trouble coming up with design ideas- or vice-versa, keeping a hands-off approach when the students need guidance). However, a team can also build off of success by realizing that they still failed during the year. Identifying those failures can help them become even more successful.

now, figuring out how involved the mentors should be to ensure competitive success while allowing for smaller, educational failures is a much harder question, because there are definitely multiple right answers, and many of them are dependent on a specific team in that specific year.

2046 has had some very successful years as well as some years that were not so good, even if we won things. In the 4 years that I was on that team, I experienced both, and feel that the successful years differed from the unsuccessful years on two points. the first was creating a successful design for the game challenge (duh). the other was being able to learn from our earlier events (first regional, every district event) and from build season, allowing us to build on our successes and identify where we failed. mentor involvement has been an issue for the team (we re-though how involved mentors should be after our flop of a season in 2013), but we were successful when we had a lot of mentor involvement, and when we had very little. I have 2 examples of such years, which were probably our two most successful, and definitely had our two best looking robots.

In 2012, my team had an extremely intelligent group, many of them more experienced seniors. however, they still worked heavily with mentors in order to complete an ambitions robot design, one that was ranked extremely high in the world (I think our OPR was in the top 80 of the world, but that was 4 years ago and I was a Freshman, so I could be blatantly wrong), and was a generally pretty OP robot. That's not to say that there weren't failures that year; the robot went into the bag not nearly complete, partially because of how long it took to make everything, but also because people messed up sometimes, and had to learn from those mistakes. that means that our first event exposed some more flaws in our design, making us realize we needed an improved intake and a hooded shooter. all of these were smaller failures, though, and learning from them lead us to even greater successes in later events, including our second regional win. Our main failure was our electronics and pneumatics, which were generally a mess. At CMP, our pneumatics developed multiple tiny leaks in the Quarterfinals; the drive team could not find them, and we ran our second match without the ability to put down our multi-tool (& we were therefore unable to use our turret).

In 2015, there was really not that much mentor involvement, yet we powder coated for the first time- a student set up the connection with a powder coating group, got their sponsorship, and then created a place in our shop to powder coat (it kinda looks like a meth lab if you're just walking by :rolleyes:). our robot design was though up of largely by students- most prototyping groups were student-lead, and it was designed, fabricated and programmed pretty much entirely by students. it worked pretty well at our first event (well, after we slowed the lift down), getting us to finals. It still had some major flaws; we were never able to fix all of them due to weight and availability of workers, but we added a top claw, canburglar, and improved our intake over the course of the season. despite not being picked at DCMP, we were at CMP, and ended up being finalists as a 22nd pick robot (we filled the perfect niche- our allies were both feeder station, and couldn't upright containers. we were a landfill robot that could). Our main failures were attempting versatility (being able to do landfill & feeder) in a game that rewarded consistency, and not using a can claw on a coaster.

Both of these years taught valuable lessons (well 2015 did to me personally, I can't say for the team yet). our success showed us ways to continue to be competitive, and our failure created improvements that were implementable over the long term.

Once you get into things mentors do for a team other than teach us skills, such as leadership, creating strategy, etc, it gets murkier; how do you let a student learn from failure as a leader, when that failure could cost your team any chance at success later in the year? I really dont think there's a right answer to this question, because in this area, both the mentors and the students are learning, and should therefore work collaboratively. IMO, there is one thing that every mentor should want: the students to be able to work without their assistance (if FRC is training most of us to be future engineers, we'll eventually need to work independently anyway): it is a mentor's job to teach us how to mill, how to use CAD, how to lead; if we've learned that, then they can take a step back, and maybe even be able to see their families during build season :ahh:


TL;DR: I have personally experienced this:
is more powerful than this:
although both give valuable lessons.


That took me over an hour of writing and re-writing... ya'll're making me think :P
I'm not going into STEM. the skills I learned here are still important (I wont go into detail here, it's not the thread's theme and my post is already way too long)

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Emphasis mine. These two stood out to me. If I have a student that has some crazy, insane idea or otherwise has objections- I don't want to let that derail the team and our process, but I also don't want to tell them "no that's a dumb idea", because that doesn't help anyone either. I want to run through the analysis with them- let them prove to themselves what the "right" answer is, and point to objective metrics of why thing A is being done.
I think lessons in humility can be taught in ways that impact the overall team less. Smaller exercises in failure rather than large ones. A failed prototype followed by an engineering analysis of that failure might do it, or an detailed analysis of the idea in question compared to other ones. I would hesitate as much as possible from letting other students down to teach one student, but that's a difficult call to make, especially with different personalities involved.

This +1000