8/31/2026
I have no education background, this is just based off of what i've seen.
I feel like there is a critical and cavernous gap between what universities teach vs how it actually gets applied. And I think thats very visible when I've seen people debugging things in real life, may that be mech, hardware, or EE. Labs are supposed to teach that but omg do they suck at doing that.
The thing is that noone can teach you how to critically think or understand the steps of debugging and the only way to do that is to try and fail at doing something. But because of how college education is structured, failure is punished so heavily and the cost of not succeeding on your first try is so high that students are incentivised to do the bare minimum.
And I think the lack of a "make a solution -> test it -> it fails -> try again" loop in most classes is causing this. If your 2 hr lab session takes your students an hour to setup the experiment, and then not giving them any resources on how to debug it, or how the circuit can fail, etc, then you really aren't teaching them how to debug, your teaching them how to bother the TAs until its done correctly. And its not like most of them don't want to learn how to debug. They do, I've taught them because my TAs were busy. But they don't get the opportunity to learn because they aren't given room to flail.
in short: when given the opportunity to fail and try again, do it.