Playground for a, Day 4, SF, Week 6

"Raise you hand if you made a mistake today!" (hands go up all around the circle) "Now, turn to your right or to your left, and use that hand to give someone sitting near you a high five!" 

Nina and Emilia demo a few different ways to add triangles to the base of the crabby bars for stability. 

Even in a place like San Francisco, where education is relatively pretty progressive, these kids don't encounter a lot of failure positivity. Because who likes to make mistakes? In the words of a few campers this morning, it's frustrating and irritating and disappointing to realize that you were wrong about something. 

Katerina, Sareena and Violet help Myla get started climbing the fly wall--with velcro attached to her hands and feet! 

But the thing is, when you take the time to reflect on a mistake, reconsider an incorrect assumption, you actually, on a physiological level, forge connections between neurons that weren't there before. It's science! 

Xochi demonstrates how elbow pads might help distribute weight on the flywall across a few more points of contact. Industrial velcro is rated to hold 10 pounds, so we're operating on the assumption that each point on our body that is stuck to the wall should be able to support 10 pounds. Which means that we'll probably need more than four points of contact! 

This knowledge frees us up a little. We know that we have to full steam ahead with our designs and plans, because we don't know what we don't know yet. We put forth sincere effort based on our designs, which are based on our assumptions about the limits of our materials, our space and ourselves. And, sometimes we confront a limit that we didn't know existed, so we have to take a step back and reconsider before we can proceed. 

When the crabby bars team raised the bars to mount them to their frame first thing this morning, they realized another mistake they made! The bars are 8' long, and so is the base. But, the bars go up at an angle, starting from 5', and up to 7' at the high end.  

Lia, Jana, Mika and Parley flip the climbing wall over onto the newly built frame this morning. After fixing a few finicky fits, this came together beautifully! 

Every day in our whole lives is full of mistakes. But today, we paid special attention to the mistakes we made, in order to try to effect how those mistakes make us feel. It's a great thing to do every once in awhile.