Quote:
Originally Posted by Rachel Lim
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.
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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?