Learning from success and failure
An extracurricular activity like Code Club can be a great place to try new things and experiment — this is why it's important to create a safe environment where getting things wrong and trying again is OK.
Here, James Robinson, Senior Learning Manager at Raspberry Pi, explains the importance and value of learning from failure.
Learning digital making can be a challenging experience for many people. Unlike maths or literacy — to which we’re constantly exposed, and have been since we were young — digital making can feel like a new language. For some people, this challenge can be a psychological barrier to getting started. We’ve seen this numerous times, with teachers and students alike sharing sentiments such as “I’m just not good at that computing stuff” and “I’ll never learn this”. We believe that the biggest challenge new programmers face does not concern their skill set but their mindset. Many new starters fall into the trap of forming a fixed mindset regarding their learning.
With a fixed mindset, learners perceive their capacity for understanding to be set in stone, established by their initial experience of the topic. In the case of children learning to program, that first experience can be challenging, and there are plenty of opportunities for failure or giving up. These failures can skew a young person's perspective and even cause them to overlook the successes they achieve along the way. Failure also causes them to undervalue these successes, to trivialise what they’ve made, and ultimately to forget that they’re only at the beginning of their journey.
Conversely, those with a growth mindset see learning as an ongoing process where new skills simply haven’t been learnt yet. Failures become part of the journey which, if examined and understood, only help to secure the learners’ understanding. Each minor success is also rightly celebrated, building the learner’s confidence and spurring them on further.
Discussion
The young people you will be supporting in your club will mostly be at the start of their journey into learning digital making. Think of a time when you were learning something new or when you made something new — perhaps something like a recipe, a language, an instrument, a piece of furniture, an item of clothing, or something electronic or online.
- How did it make you feel when you completed it or achieved a goal?
- Did you make it correctly first time, or were their any bumps in your journey?
- What did you learn from the experience?
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