Salutations! Sadly, this is my last blog post. It’s crazy how fast this year went by. As the year is wrapping up, I’ve taken the time to reflect on all the projects I’ve done this year in PLTW beginning of this year.

You’re human, you’re going to fail. It doesn’t matter when or what you did, you’re going to fail. Throughout the first semester, I did a lot of difficult modules not knowing what I was doing half of the time. For the other half of that time, I was obsessed with the idea of perfecting every little thing I did for the assignment. Most of the grades I got for the challenges could’ve been better, mostly because my end products were not the best and completely failed to work. I had the mentality that my first design is the best and won’t fail, which is wrong. Perfecting your project won’t save you from failing.

When you do fail, get back up and keep trying. In the 2nd semester, Georgia, Maite, Claudia, Alyssa and I did our maker project on LED light up shirts. We went through so many struggles such as not knowing how to program to the lights to change colors, not having any idea how to sew at all and at some points we had no idea what was going on. Sometimes we regretted choosing our project, but we didn’t give up entirely. Yeah, we got frustrated and gave up on certain tasks, but when we did, we would take a break and start all over on the task and keep trying.

Nobody’s perfect! No one is born doing something perfectly, so don’t use that mentality! It’s super important to try over and over again, especially when you think whatever you did is perfect, you can always make it better. This was applicable in PLTW and in real life. While designing a prototype, you may think “Wow! This is the best thing I’ve ever made, I can’t believe I made this!” but in reality, it could fail miserably immediately after you say that or it could be much better than the ideal “perfect.”

Lastly, I want to leave you with how great the idea of failure and resiliency is. Not only was it applicable in real life but also in this class with all the projects. Failure is great and a key necessity to life. Without failure, you can’t succeed.