Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

Early on, in one of our first Fab Lab Boot Camps for middle-school age kids, one of them said something very telling.  We were telling them about the projects they’d be working on and one said “What if we fail?”  We stopped everything and hastily put together a lesson about failure and what a good teacher it can be, if you go to the school. 

We asked the kids what they had heard or learned about failure at school.  There was a long silence until one of the boys said “That I can’t kick a soccer ball very well.”  I then asked if that means he should give up because he’ll never be able to kick a soccer ball.  The conversation then centered around the idea that if he practiced, he could get better at kicking.  We then showed them a video about famous failures of all time and how those people learned from their failures to move forward to do great things. 

Now, we always dedicate a portion of the time we spend with young students to talk about failure and how it should be celebrated and not feared.  When we fail at something, actually when something has an unexpected outcome, we learn from it to determine what we need to change in order to get the desired outcome.  Once that lesson is learned, it stays with us for a long time; much longer than if we read about how to get the desired outcome from a book or even YouTube video. 

In a world where we can easily get rote answers by asking Google or Amazon Echo, we need to teach our youth to concentrate much more on experiential learning by doing, and failing, than by merely memorizing a bunch of dates, facts and formulas.  We need to celebrate the journey, the hard work and the learning, more than the final result.  Having high test scores, whether on standardized tests or on the SAT, has little correlation with how someone is actually prepared to face real world challenges.  These test scores also sort the students into the “academic” ones and the “non-academic” ones.  In our Fab Lab ICC experience, we find that many people, of all ages, that have been branded as “non-academic” are really some of the smartest and most talented problem solvers we see. 

We’re starting to see more and more schools moving toward project based learning, concentrating on learning by doing and learning from failure.  The change can’t come soon enough.  Turning students loose to do projects of great interest to them, whether individual or team sets them up for all kinds of great learning, even from the failures along the way to completion.  People will learn whatever they need to learn to solve the problems at hand in accomplishing something of great interest to them.