Learning by falling off.

There is a new game show in the UK on ITV 1 on Saturday nights called “The Cube”. If you haven’t seen it yet I would encourage you to watch it as it provides a fascinating insight into learning and the power of repetition.

The basic premise of the show is that contestants have to stand inside a large transparent cube and complete a series of challenges. They start with 9 lives and every time they fail a challenge they loose a life. Every time they complete a challenge they win more money. If they run out of lives, they loose all the money. Contestants can decline challenges and walk away with however much money they have won but once they have accepted a challenge they will either complete it or run out of lives trying.

What has been most fascinating for me has been watching contestants learning from their mistakes every time they fail a challenge. Some complete the challenge by quickly learning what caused them to fail and correcting the error but for others they miss the key learning point and loose several lives before finally completing the challenge. The power of repetition means that for some, one failed attempt is enough but for others it takes more.

Another interesting aspect has been contestants bringing prior learning to the challenges. Last week a contestant was set a challenge that required him to throw a ball across the cube into a small hole. He completed it first time but only then revealed that he was a very experienced darts player. The repetition of throwing darts enabled him to throw the ball straight through the hole.

Allowing learners to make mistakes is crucial to the learning process. How many children ride a bike straight off?  Most, if not all, learn by falling off.

In the training room we use repetition to embed learning and what this programme demonstrates is that the amount of repetition required varies a lot from person to person. It is not so surprising then that even after several rounds of repetition some of our learners still haven’t quite got it.

The solution however would seem fairly straight forward. They just need to be allowed to fall off a few more times.

signpost image by fireflythegreat

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