Help with convert a string to date

2 years ago I was a very beginner learning with mysql and php and I created my first MySQL database and I made a huge mistake and now I am regret.

That mistake was I created a table that has a date column but I created that column as a Text data type and that column now has over 2000 records in format like this "01:13:2006" and the column name is regdate

Now, I am having problem with this date column and I would like to convert this column into a date datatype with its format like "01/13/2006"

I tried this statement

but it does not do any update.

Can you help me?
Thanks

you were close

So I can't use this format %m/%d/%Y?

Could you please show me if after I converted to this format %m:%d:%Y then to this %m/%d/%Y?

you need to understand the difference between a DATE datatype, and the string representation of a date

once you have created your DATE column values, you can display them in whatever format you want, using the DATE_FORMAT function if you want to do it in the sql

however, best practice says to retrieve the DATE untouched, and do any custom formatting in the application language (php or whatever)

Ah, got it.

Thanks so much