Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankJ
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.
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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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared Russell
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.
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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.