Grit

As we work to have students learn about perseverance our school has made an effort to have students not give up easily when they do not understand something. The programming and assembly required for this Raspberry Pi project certainly makes student work. An example is the student who work tirelessly to get his LED blinking. He had little trouble setting up the Raspberry Pi, loading the OS and connecting the peripherals but when it came to connecting the LED it was not as easy (this was true for everyone).
   There are essentially two components to this connection. 1) you need to write a Python program to control the GPIO ports on the Pi and 2) you need to properly connect the GPIO pins to the breadboard and LED.

He entered the program into the Python shell and connected the Pi to the breadboard. When he ran the program nothing happened - no blinking just lighting. He reviewed the program, he watched the video on how to connect it, he asked me for help and I suggested that the rewrite the program. Still, it did not work. We looked at the connections and it looked correct - well it wasn't. It took three class periods to figure it out but he was successful. I was impressed by his effort and he was excited about his success.  It seems obvious that problems like this and the other typical programming problems allow for repeated failure followed by success thereby demonstrating that sometimes you have to work hard, fail, repeat -- to succeed.