In yesterday’s episode of TED Radio Hour, “Nudge,” one of the featured talks was by Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code. In her TED Talk, Saujani speaks of our nation’s bravery deficit, saying that, “Our economy, our society, we’re just losing out because we’re not raising our girls to be brave.”
I listened to Reshma Saujani with interest, but froze when I heard her relate this anecdote from her experiences with Girls Who Code, “During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code,a student will call her over and she’ll say, ‘I don’t know what code to write.’ The teacher will look at her screen, and she’ll see a blank text editor. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses undo a few times, she’ll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn’t get it exactly right.Instead of showing the progress that she made, she’d rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust.”
The reason this example electrified me was because I had just witnessed the same phenomenon last week, but hadn’t recognized it.
During the “Undercover Robots Camp” session I held last week, the teams were tasked with programming their robots to “save” three plastic figures at various locations on the floor. The groups immediately headed for the craft table to design augmentations for the robots to help pick up the plastic figures.
As I observed the groups, I noticed that a few of them felt the need to add more to their robots when they noticed their designs didn’t work. They didn’t take things off – just kept adding things. A couple of them began to look like robot anteater hybrids because the teams kept adding longer “scoopers” to the front, and I found it very intriguing that they never reflected on what might need to be changed or subtracted – just that they needed “more.”
Those groups, interestingly enough, were comprised almost entirely of boys (1 girl out of 7). I had one all-girl group, who seemed to have the opposite strategy – do nothing. They looked like they were doing something every time I strolled by the table, but nothing stayed on their robot, and they had not even begun the programming part of the task.
After a break, where I talked to all of the groups about really thinking about what might need to be changed instead of just randomly selecting new things to add to the robots, the other 3 groups took my suggestion to heart and began to modify their constructions. The all-girl group continued to struggle. I was concerned that they weren’t getting along with each other, and encouraged them to discuss their ideas, or maybe delegate tasks. Nothing I could say seemed to help, though.
When time was up, the girls had nothing on their robot, and only a few lines of code. I felt like I had failed in helping them, and I’m sure they didn’t feel too happy, either.
All weekend, I wondered how I could have handled the situation differently. And then I heard Reshma Saujani. I realized why my advice to those girls had been useless; I wasn’t addressing the real problem. Although communication may have been a factor, the true issue was that they just couldn’t figure out how to do the task perfectly.
Now, I don’t believe that every girl strives for perfection and that boys never do. But I have seen students of both genders who don’t know how to adjust to making mistakes; they treat errors like kryptonite. As Reshma Saujani states, it is quite likely our society contributes to this type of mindset in girls – particularly by raising boys to be “rough and tumble” and girls to be “safe.”
If I could rewind back to last Friday, I would sit with those girls and ask for their ideas. I would ask them to choose one to try, and we would try it together. We would reflect on it afterward and make some changes to make it better. I might even tell them about Reshma Saujani’s talk, and ask them what they think.
Just to be clear, I am not advocating for us to teach children to deliberately make mistakes or fail. What we need to do is to teach them to deliberate thoughtfully, and to learn from imperfection rather than to be paralyzed by it.
