Ana Lorena Fabrega

What is it about video games that motivates kids to try again and again even when they fail?

Mark Rober, former NASA and Apple engineer and current Science YouTuber, ran an experiment to try to answer this question.

He had 50,000 participants attempt to solve a computer programming puzzle. He assigned two different versions of the challenge:

In one version, if participants weren’t successful, they got a message that said: “That didn’t work. Please try again.” They did not lose points for failing.

In the other version, if participants weren’t successful, they got a message that said: “That didn’t work. You lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.”

For those who lost points for failed attempts, their success rate in completing the puzzle was around 52%.

For those who did not lose points for failed attempts, their success rate was 68%. Participants in this group had nearly 2.5 times more attempts to solve the puzzle. On average, they learned more from trial and error and got better results.

My takeaway from Rober’s experiment is that when mistakes are not penalized, people are more likely to keep trying. And if they keep trying, they have more chances of eventually succeeding.

This sounds straightforward, yet in school we don’t operate this way. Kids in school are taught that if they try and fail, they will get penalized with a bad grade that will go on their permanent record.

What if we reframed the learning process in such a way that kids did not concern themselves with failure? How much more could they learn? How much more successful could they be?