Try & Try Again
AI, Machine Learning, The Psychology Of Human Learning
Much has been said (in entrepreneurship and in life) about trying and trying, and never giving up.
This week I discussed a learning method where students were given unlimited tries to answer all questions in an exam. However, to progress to the next question (next level) they would have to answer the earlier question correctly. Students were graded on how many questions (levels) they could reach in a fixed amount of time.
Learning happened best when there was an increasingly longer time delay between attempts. For example, the first time you failed to answer a question correctly, you could try again immediately. If you failed the second time answering the same question, you’d have to wait 5-minutes before answering the question again. If you failed a third, fourth or fifth time, you’d have to wait 15, 30 and 60 minutes before your next try.
The time-lag allowed students to reflect on their incorrect answer instead of mindlessly trying multiple answers. Also, knowing that there would be an even longer time-lag before trying again made students more careful in their next attempt. Finally, the exam time limit encouraged students to try again as soon as they could instead of skipping the question or spending too much time thinking and getting stuck.
So… if you’ve failed, you must try and try again to “level up”. Just remember to reflect, learn, and place more care and thought into your next attempt. All the best to you!
😁 This learning method is used by 42 – a tuition-free computer programming school. Click here to read about how a team of 4 Malaysian students from 42KL beat 33 global teams to place 2nd in a global ecological hackathon. They were also the only team to develop a machine learning model with plankton identification accuracy higher than the current system used by Tara Ocean Foundation. For more information on the coding school, 42KL - https://42kl.edu.my/