Value in Failure vs. Value in Success

[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.