Giving Compass' Take:

• Babies that watch an adult struggle at a task learn lessons about perseverance and grit. understanding how babies learn and grow is key to building better computer learning. 

• How can this information be used to improve early childhood education? What does this discovery mean for machine learning? 

• Find out how machine learning can be leveraged for social impact.

Even at MIT, no one’s been able to create a computer as powerful as the brain of a baby.

“They’re better at doing this fast learning from one or two examples than any computer algorithm we have right now,” MIT graduate student Julia Leonard said. “That’s a big interest here — everyone’s like, ‘We want a computer to learn like a baby.’ ”

Leonard was curious about how babies learn too, so she gathered up more than 200 to analyze their genius brains. Specifically, she was interested in studying how babies learn skills like grit and growth mindset from adults, especially as schools are placing more emphasis on developing student character and social-emotional competencies.

In a study Leonard published in Science, she found that babies were able to persist in a difficult task if they first saw an adult struggle to succeed, suggesting that grit and perseverance can be taught by example to the powerfully observational young baby brain.

For Leonard, these results revealed that after just a few brief moments of observation, babies’ brains are able to learn the value of effort and persistence.

Read the full article about teaching grit and resilience by Kate Stringer at The 74.