TITLE: Next Semester: A Prize for Failure
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 06, 2011  5:12 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
This is finals week, so my Intelligent Systems students
have presented their projects and submitted their code
and documentation.  All that's left for some of them is
to submit their project notebooks.  By and large, all
four teams did good job this semester, and I'm happy
both with the produced and with the way they produced
it.

(The notebooks may be an exception, and that means I
need to do a better job convincing them to write as
they think and learn throughout the semester.)

A couple of teams were disappointed that they did not
accomplish as much as they had hoped.  I reassured
them that when we explore, we often take wrong turns.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be exploration!  In science,
too, we sometime run experiments that fail.  Still,
we can learn from the experience.

This experience, coupled with a tweet I saw a week or
so ago, has given me my first new idea for <EM>next</EM>
semester:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM><STRONG>
a prize for the best failed idea of the semester
</STRONG></EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I teach Programming Languages in the fall, in which students
learn Scheme, functional programming, and a fair bit about
language interpretation.  All of these are fertile areas for
failure, by students and professor alike!  At this early
stage of planning, I think I'll announce the prize early in
the semester and allow students to submit entries throughout.
A strong candidate for the prize will be an idea that seemed
good at the time, so the student tried it out, whether in
code or some other form.  After investing time and energy,
the student has to undo the work, maybe even start from
scratch, in order to solve the original problem.

This sounds like failure to most students, but the point of
the prize is this: <B>you can learn a lot from an idea that
doesn't pan out</B>.  If students can look back on their
failures and understand why it was valuable trying the
ideas anyway, they will have learned something.  Whether
they win a prize or not, they may well end up with a funny
story to tell!

Now, I need a good name for the prize.
<A HREF="mailto:wallingf@cs.uni.edu">
   Suggestions are welcome</A>!

I also need a prize.  I've considered the possibility of
giving extra credit but just about convinced myself to do
something more fun and perhaps more lasting.  Besides,
course credit is so <EM>not</EM> the point.  Giving extra
credit might encourage broader participation among the
students, but I believe that the number of students who
care more about their grades than about learning is
smaller than most people think.  And the idea of offering
a prize is to encourage a willingness to explore good
ideas, even to cultivate a sense of adventure.  Awarding
class points would be like giving your best friend in the
world money as a birthday gift: it misses the point.

My hope in offering such a prize is to help students
move a little down the path from thinking like this:

<CENTER>
<A HREF="http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/failure_cake.htm">
<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/humor/failure-cake.jpg"
     ALT="the failure cake"
     WIDTH="350"
     ALIGN="center" />
</A>
</CENTER>

to thinking like
<A HREF="http://www.ewb.ca/en/whoweare/accountable/failure.html">
   this</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
[Engineers Without Borders] believes that success in development
is not possible without taking risks and innovating -- which
inevitably means failing sometimes.  We also believe that it's
important to publicly celebrate these failures, which allows us
to share the lessons more broadly and create a culture that
encourages creativity and calculated risk taking.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

An annual report of failures!  These are engineers who get it.
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