About Philip
Philip Liu leads TechCayman’s education programmes, running robotics camps, hackerspaces and in-school workshops that support Cayman’s future tech talent. A Harvard-trained computer scientist, Phil has built enterprise software and high-frequency trading systems. In Phil’s Corner, he shares what’s been on his mind.
Competition vs Collaboration
As I run robotics and technology education programs, I get asked a lot about competition. “Is there a competition at the end of the year?” “Do the teams compete against each other during the camp?” And most commonly, “Can we build battle bots?”
We don’t compete in our programs. Don’t get me wrong, competition is an extremely effective motivator. Take any subject in school, turn it into a contest, and we can instantly create massive increases in engagement. Learners who were bored a minute ago are suddenly pulling out all the stops.
This also isn’t a case of sour grapes – I won a bunch of competitions back in my long-ago school days (valedictorian, martial arts championships, presidency of clubs and organizations, various other things of equally questionable value that look good on a college application), and I’m still not sure I believe in it. Yes, the guy who won the things doesn’t believe in some of the things he won, or rather, he believes that maybe they shouldn’t have even existed in the first place.
Competition does exist in the real world. Evolution is a competition for limited resources. Capitalist free markets might be said to be a competition, though that may be wildly over-simplifying and more than a bit naive. Athletic and skill competitions of all flavors are thrilling spectacles; there is certainly something truly beautiful to witness the pinnacles of human achievement as they are happening.
But how much competition do we, as average individuals, really encounter in our everyday lives? In our workplaces, are we competing with our colleagues? Are we working against them or with them? At worst, we’re working in parallel.
One could say that we compete for jobs, but in that market, many (most?) elements are out of our control – we don’t have a huge say in our socioeconomic status, our educational opportunities, or the connections that happen to cross our path. Most of that is chance. Where we were born and who we were born to are probably the two largest predictors of future financial health, and we didn’t get a vote in either. Can it really be called a competition if the results were determined primarily outside of our sphere of influence?
If we don’t encounter much competition in our adult lives, why does it feature so much in education*?
Competition, in a pure form, shows us who is best. Why is that valuable in an educational setting? The best and the brightest are already going to have stellar careers. Do we really need to flaunt that? In a contest that has only one winner, everyone else is a loser. I’m not sure I see how that’s constructive in education. All those “losers” are still going to enter the workforce and find gainful, hopefully fulfilling, employment.
At its core, competition teaches us to base our self-worth on the abilities of others. We lose because someone else was better, we win because someone else wasn’t as good. I think this is a very dangerous and potentially harmful lesson at any age. Basing our value on things that are entirely out of our control is incredibly risky and unreliable. The only metric we should be using to measure ourselves is our past selves. If we are better today than we were yesterday or last year or last decade, then we are winning.
In the education programs we run at TechCayman, there is only collaboration. Teams do not compete against each other. Each team shares solutions they have discovered with the other teams so everyone can continue to work on unsolved challenges. “A rising tide lifts all boats.” We don’t reinvent the wheel in real-world tech. When we encounter challenges, one of the very first steps is to search to see if someone else has already found a solution. Of course, copying another’s work is certainly a divergence from policies and practices in school, but we’re trying to prepare these youth for careers in the real world. Learning foundational principles is essential, but we don’t send an email by first building Gmail from scratch. Giants have come before us; we would be remiss to not stand on their shoulders.
At the end of our programs, it doesn’t matter what each team has or has not achieved. It only matters that they have achieved more than when they walked through the door. The best metric for their success is themselves.
And no, however thrilling it might have been, we will not be building battle bots.
*Practically speaking, in an education setting, competition is an exceptionally useful tool for educators because it is efficient. Guiding learners to self-motivate based on self-improvement is immensely time intensive and requires a lot of personalized attention, which is not feasible in most school environments. Teachers are doing their best; let’s cut them a lot of slack.
Phil’s Corner is a personal column written by Philip Liu.
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