It is fashionable these days to avoid the ‘F’ word – by which, of course, I mean “Fail”. This is not confined to the area of teaching Computing, but enough people in this field have written about it to nudge me into writing my thoughts on the matter. So, the FAIL acronym, in case you haven’t come across it, is First Attempt In Learning. The idea of it is that instead of telling kids that they have failed at something, you tell that they have not failed. They may have not succeeded, but that is fine, because it was a First Attempt In Learning. Well, I have always been a believer in telling it how it is, and so for me the FAIL acronym does not benefit kids at all. Quite the opposite in fact. Here are my objections: