For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, basically, the way the game works is like this: The point is to get the proper robot in its proper space in as few moves as possible. But, when you move a robot in one direction, it keeps moving in that direction until it hits a barrier, at which point it stops. If you take a look at the board it might give you a better idea of how this works:
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image stolen from http://codehats.co/blog/2014/01/18/robots.html
So basically, a tile is flipped in the middle, and that tells you which space you have to get that colour robot to. In this picture, the tile in the middle is the blue moon. So, you need to get the blue robot to the blue moon space. The first move is to move the red robot up. Then you move the green robot over to the right. Then you move the blue robot (using the red and green robots as barriers) and get it to the blue moon. You have a timer that counts down, and everyone around the table just yells out how many moves they think it takes, and the first person who identifies and shouts out the fewest number of moves wins. In this case, it's eight.
Needless to say, I was terrible at this game. (My cousin Mike could do incredible things - yell out 'twelve!' accurately without having had time to serially count the moves. His girlfriend Amy was giving him a run for his money, too. They're a good match.) Spatial thinking has never been my strong suit. But as I was playing the game, I could practically feel new neuronal connections forging themselves. It's not that I'm stupid, or that I could never be good at a game like this. It's just that I haven't honed that part of my intelligence. But as I continued to play the game, I was getting more and more answers, faster and with greater accuracy. I in no way approximated the performance of others around the table, but I felt damn good about learning.
If I had played this game a few years ago, I would have felt crushed in the face of my inability. I would have felt terrible about myself. Instead, I was able to see the game for what it was, and what it wasn't. It wasn't a measure of my worth as a human being, nor was it a measure of my intelligence. It was, however, an opportunity for me to learn and develop an aspect of my intelligence that I often neglect in favour of other aspects.
Over the years I have put a lot of stock in the label 'smart'. I grew up around kids who were fiercely intelligent and we were told that we were smart when we were younger. Marks in school were my way of measuring my self-worth. I felt completely ineffective in every other department of life - looks, sports, popularity, arts, you name it - but if I could just get good marks, I could cling to the belief that I was worth something. Big surprise, then, that when I got poorer marks, I felt like jumping out of a window. I put so much stock in good marks as a measure of intelligence, and as a measure of self worth, that any poor mark was a negative reflection of my intelligence, and therefore my worth as a person.
So, I began to fear failure, because failure was a sign of my overall ineptitude. I would shy away from challenges, even things that I loved, like playing music, because my failure in any domain was tantamount to my failing as a human being.
Research by Carol Dweck and colleagues* has actually lent evidence to the fact that praising children for being intelligent implants in children's minds the idea that intelligence is static. These children tend to care deeply about performance and see performance as a measure of worth. These children shy away from challenges and miss out on valuable learning opportunities. Children who are praised for effort, on the other hand, relish a challenge and see failure as a learning opportunity.
It has taken me too long to realize that, contrary to what I believed as a child, intelligence is not static. It is fluid and can be changed with practice, and especially, challenge. I am still undoing the damage that the myth of static intelligence has wreaked on my mind. Now in graduate school, I am less concerned about individual marks than my overall learning experience. I am not afraid to make mistakes and try to grasp things that are just beyond my reach, because I have come to find that that is where real learning happens. More than ever before, I am putting myself in situations where I am forced to bend my brain in ways it usually doesn't, just to force the growth of new synapses. I don't want to be held back by my fear of failure anymore.
So, if anyone wants to play a game of Ricochet Robots with me, or any other spatially-oriented game for that matter, I accept the challenge. I may get frustrated, and I may have to actively stave off those feelings of being a failure that still seep in at the edges of my consciousness, but damn it, I'll play. And I'll improve.
It is just a game, after all.
* http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/75/1/33/
