Reflections on the Climb, the Challenge — and Learning to Code, a personal reflection to connect to my interest with DGE Desk

 

Reflections on the Climb, the Challenge — and Learning to Code

Semester 1 is done and dusted, and the June holidays are finally here! A heartfelt thank you to everyone who stepped up during the election period—those who served, supported, and covered. Your efforts helped uphold a fair and accessible democratic process. You made a difference.

The Challenge

A university professor I know runs an electric car CCA. Each year, he challenges his students to design and build a car as fast as a sports car. He doesn’t give them the solution—just the conditions to try. Along the way, they face technical unknowns, tough design choices, and inevitable setbacks.

His goal isn’t really about cars—it’s about building learners who can solve complex, real-world problems. Many of his students go on to become engineers, founders, and innovators. Why? Because they’ve learned to thrive in ambiguity, to persevere, and to collaborate. The challenge wasn’t a task. It was a transformation.

The Code

This same spirit lives in learning to code, especially when it’s rooted in authentic, open-ended tasks like building simulations in EJS, webEJS, or experimenting with AI-powered tools.

When students learn to build a physics simulation from scratch—or edit an interactive using webEJS—they aren’t just “learning to code.” They’re designing a system. They’re debugging. They're thinking in models. They’re developing cognitive flexibility, creative problem-solving, and resilience in the face of errors and unknowns.

Whether it’s scripting a gravity model, animating energy transformations, or prompting an AI assistant to generate responsive code—these tasks mimic the journey and the challenge. There’s no single right answer. There’s no step-by-step worksheet. Students must explore, test, fail, and try again. And just like the climb, the satisfaction isn’t just in the finished product. It’s in what they’ve become through the process.

The Question

So here’s the question:
Should school be more like the climb? More like the challenge? More like coding an interactive from scratch—where the learning happens in the solving?

If we truly want to prepare students for a future where they don’t just consume technology but create it, then perhaps this is the kind of learning we should offer more of.

Let’s make space for more worthy tasks.
Let’s make room for the climb.