I want to talk about one of the most sensitive — even painful — topics in robotics and coding education: competitions and ready-made shortcuts.
When contest season approaches, we sadly see a wrong fashion in education: the student walks onto the stage with a robot the teacher built, coded, or simply bought ready-made.
This is one of the worst things you can do to a child
If a student never went beyond tightening a screw, never wrestled with a single line of code, never sweated to fix a bug — what does a medal mean?
That medal is often not the child's. It is the adult ego being fed. It creates false confidence: I won the award. It teaches shortcuts and winning without work.
Sadly, some of these shortcut students start believing they are world-class robotics experts. They may not know what a breadboard is. They may never have read the rulebook... And then they show off to classmates who spent weeks in the process, looking down on handmade robots. That breaks the spirit of students who truly worked. So tell me: Did we do that student a favor?
My principle is clear: You are as big as your effort!
Here is the core: the student will work, struggle, fail, break things, and fix them with their own hands. The teacher is only a guide.
I would rather see my student finish last with a slightly slow robot they built and fully understand, than finish first with a perfect robot made by the teacher. That last place teaches engineering and effort; the other first place often teaches only how to play a role.
Not the fish — the fishing rod
Let children struggle. Let their code fail. Let their robots leave the line. Real learning happens while solving those errors. If we hand them ready fish, we only fill their stomachs; if we teach them to make a fishing rod, we help them change the world.
The future does not belong to those who take what is ready-made; it belongs to those who build, sweat, and can say with a straight back: I made this!
