When England’s Laura Bassett kicked the soccer ball into her
own team’s goal last week, England lost its Women’s World Cup semi-final match
to Japan.
It was a mistake. She’d attempted to kick the ball away, of
course, but the ball went left off her foot instead of right and snuck past
England’s goalkeeper. Bassett wept. Her teammates hung their heads. Soccer fans
throughout England were crushed.
Through all this sadness and disappointment, there’s
something for us to learn. As an educator, I think there’s tremendous value in
mistakes of all shapes and sizes. I maintain that every mistake can be viewed
as a positive because it reveals a little bit of the truth.
If we’re solving a problem, a few solid mistakes lay the
path to the solution. This morning I was conscious of the truth-revealing
nature of mistakes as I dropped my two young daughters off for the first day of
their one-week technology camp called “Adventures in Robotics.”
The Debugging
Philosophy
During the camp, which is run by the California-based company
ID Tech and held on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University, I’m hoping
that my girls make hundreds of mistakes, perhaps even thousands, as they learn
how to create computer programs to bring small robots to life.
Part of what they’ll learn is how to debug the instructions
they type into a computer. If the program does not work properly, they’ll have
to figure out why, fix it and try again.
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| Seymour Papert |
No educator has spoken more persistently and eloquently
about the value of mistakes in learning and adopting a “debugging philosophy”
than mathematician and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Seymour
Papert. For decades, the now 87-year-old Papert has argued that schools have
given the word “mistake” a bad name. He explains this in his 1980 book
“Mindstorms” (subtitled “Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas”).
“The ethic of school has rubbed off too well. What we see as
a good program with a small bug, the child sees as ‘wrong,’ ‘bad,’ ‘a mistake.’
School teaches that errors are bad; the last thing one wants to do is to pore
over them, dwell on them, or think about them,” Papert writes.
He continues in his book, “The child is glad to take
advantage of the computer’s ability to erase it all without any trace for
anyone to see. The debugging philosophy suggests an opposite attitude. Errors benefit
us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong,
and, through understanding, to fix it. Experience with computer programming
leads children more effectively than any other activity to ‘believe in’ debugging.”
In 1999, I had the good fortune of taking a class with
Papert at MIT while I was attending the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The class had no tests, no assignments and no textbooks. Instead, led by
Papert’s questions, we spent each class discussing and debating ideas and
talking through how people solve problems. It was marvelous.
“Everyone learns from
mistakes”
My daughters this week will have a bit more structure in
class. Their teacher, whom I met this morning, goes by Dr. Beats (aka Nathan)
and studied robotic engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He will be
introducing the class to LEGO Mindstorms’ robotic platform to teach them how to
use motors, sensors and computer programs to create robots.
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| ID Tech's Dr. Beats |
LEGO Mindstorms was developed through a partnership between
the MIT Media Lab and LEGO. The origins go back to Papert. In the 1960s, Papert
co-developed a programming language called LOGO aimed at improving the way
children think and solve problems. LOGO allowed a small turtle robot to
draw line graphics based on simple computer commands. It encouraged exploration
and experimentation by both the students and teachers. To Papert, this is key.
“Some people who observe the children’s growing tolerance
for their ‘errors’ attribute the change of attitude to the LOGO teachers who
are matter-of-fact and uncritical in the presence of programs the child sees as
‘wrong,’ ” Papert writes. “I think
that there is something more fundamental going on. In the LOGO environment,
children learn that the teacher too is a learner, and that everyone learns from
mistakes.”
A Glimpse of the
Future
In addition to making mistakes and learning from them, I
hope this week my girls have fun and develop confidence in their ability to
solve problems. As a parent, though, I must confess an ulterior motive. If this
experience happens to ignite a spark that leads either or both of them to a
future interest in computer science, that will be just fine.
I am keenly aware that as my girls reach college in 10 years
and then begin their job search, computer science jobs will be abundant. In
fact, over the next 10 years, there will be 1 million more computer jobs
than students to fill them. Moreover, of the 6 industries expected to grow the most
by 2020 (just 5 years away), technology pays the highest at an average of $78,730
a year. (See an infographic created by the Computer Science Zone.)
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| Credit: computersciencezone.org |
The reality is that our schools are not doing enough to
prepare students for these jobs. Today, 9 of 10 high schools in the U.S. don’t
offer computer science classes. In addition, girls continue to not choose
computer science as a major or as a career as well. Of all the computer science
graduates today, only 12% are women.
So, while Laura Bassett’s mistake was on a big stage in front
of millions of viewers, perhaps it also offers a glimmer of the truth. Maybe,
as some soccer analysts have suggested, she was out of position slightly,
allowing her opponent to get past her at a critical moment. She tried to adjust,
made an error and no doubt has learned a valuable (and difficult) lesson.
During this week and well beyond, I can only hope the same
for my daughters.
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