Joseph Williams

Shemar and about two dozen children at Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School, a struggling, mostly African-American school in Charm City, had formed small teams to build “battlebots” — simple, battery-powered devices made from Lego bricks. The goal: Win a king-of-the-hill competition to prove which team had the best bot.

But Shemar’s team, the Gravediggers (motto: “We dig holes and take souls”), wanted to avoid the catch embedded in the exercise: Early versions of their bot would probably fail on the battlefield, sending them back to the drawing board. Indeed, the Gravediggers’ first creation — heavily fortified but barely tested — was in pieces after a couple of bouts.

“They did you a favor!” Aron Lee, the class instructor, boomed from halfcourt, shouting amid the din of 10- and 11-year-olds scrambling for Lego bricks, fixing defeated bots and trash-talking one another. “They showed you where your weak spots are!”

Then, a reminder. “Failure is your fuel,” he told the Gravediggers and anyone else within earshot. “But remember — you have to fail fast.”

That in a nutshell was the objective of the weekly lab that Lee and his company, Deilab (pronounced DAY-lab), conducts at Eutaw-Marshburn, which is near a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood northeast of downtown. While the activities are hands-on lessons in science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM, Lee says the children are also learning about resilience: the willingness to overcome adversity and try, try again.

Resilience, sometimes known as grit or perseverance, is generally described as the ability to work past obstacles, adapt after failure and stay focused on a long-term goal despite stress and hardship. The subject of decades of research, social scientists and academics say it’s an important component of long-term academic success.

“Resilience as a formal concept is about 40 years old,” said J. Lawrence Aber, a psychology professor at New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “Resilience used to mean kids who ‘took a licking and kept on ticking.’ People misattributed the notion of resilience to kids who weren’t set back by adversity or risk. Over time, the concept has changed a lot.”

A wider understanding of the concept, he said, sweeps in children who endure daily life in adverse environments — impoverished neighborhoods, violent homes or failing schools — rather than having to push past a single traumatic event.

With those standards, going to school at Eutaw-Marshburn could be considered a daily act of resilience. According to its 2017-18 Maryland state Department of Education report card, the school received just 3.6 out of a possible 20 points in academic achievement, six out of 30 points in academic progress, and 6.6 out of 25 points in school quality and student success.

The numbers resulted in a dismal rank — just one out of a possible five stars.

The surrounding neighborhood has its troubles, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The median household income is $28,116, about $50,000 below the state median, and 36 percent of residents live below the poverty line. Tiffany Cole, the Eutaw-Marshburn principal, said it was common for students to show up hungry when the morning bell rings, and the STEM classes other children take for granted were nonexistent.

“The computers in the computer lab don’t work,” she said.

Perhaps that’s why Lee sees himself as somewhat of an equalizer. When he brings the battlebots and Legos to private schools, he said, resilience is reflected in the culture of those schools, and it’s probably reinforced at home.

At schools like Eutaw-Marshburn, he said, “not only is it not reflected day to day in the work that they’re doing — they hire us to be a bit disruptive.”

That disruption, he said, includes linking resilience to their own lives.

“The world is a boxing match,” said Lee, who is tall and gregarious. “The minute you leave this space, you’re going to get hit. But if you don’t believe in yourself, why is anyone else going to believe in you or your ideas?”

Nevertheless, “you also have to be willing to test those ideas. You also have to be willing to budget for failure — it’s a concept people don’t think about, adults or kids,” he said. “It’s the beauty of a bad idea. It’s not supposed to be pretty early. It’s ugly early. It gets pretty later as you begin to test and as you begin to innovate.”

Back at the bot battle, pushing on Legos to strengthen their machine, Shemar and his teammates seemed to catch the lesson.

After a string of early defeats, they paused to figure out what was going wrong. They also sent out a spy: Shemar’s friend and teammate, Zya Watson, 11, to check out what the winning teams were doing right. A few rounds later, the Gravediggers caught fire, reeling off a series of wins.

Then, as the opening bars of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” blasted from Lee’s speaker, the Gravediggers’ battlebot smashed one built by the Warriors, the last team standing between them and the top of the hill.

“It wasn’t going good at the start because we spent too much time” trying to build “the perfect bot,” Shemar said after the competition. “We kept losing and kept losing.”

Things turned around, he said, when the team decided to stop focusing on their defeats and figure out how to win.

“While the rest of the teams, they were going out and they were fighting, and when they would lose, they would see, like, what was wrong,” Shemar said. “We thought that, like, everybody’s bots were just going to beat ours, that’s why we spent so much time trying to build the perfect bot. And it wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/education/learning/deilab-baltimore-lego-robots.html" id="68125952-2761-3a9e-aa2b-900381c46a9d">The New York Times</a>.

BALTIMORE — On a blustery winter afternoon in a school gym that had seen better days, Shemar Watkins, 11, and three friends huddled over a pile of Legos, learning how to fail. The lesson wasn’t going well.

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Joseph Williams

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Building Bots and Confidence