Value in Failure vs. Value in Success

[Monochron]

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.

[Deke]

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?

[FrankJ]

Originally Posted by Infinity2718

As a mentor/coach/teacher I think it is incorrect to choose or let someone fail. ...

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.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Ginger Power

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. ....

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.

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.

[Siri]

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.

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).

[cbale2000]

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.

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?

[IKE]

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.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by IKE

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.

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.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by IKE

From a value perspective, I would actually say, that you learn more from 1 success than 1 failure.

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.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

...snip...

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.

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.

[Deke]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[marshall]

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.

[Chief Hedgehog]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

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.

Love this comment.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by IKE

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.

Originally Posted by marshall

...

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.

[Clem1640]

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.