Robots That Communicate, Students Who Collaborate
Imagine two student-coded robots: one detects an obstacle and instantly warns the other to reroute. No teacher interventions, no manual reset, no controller inputs –just robots communicating with robots. The newest update for the VEX AIM Coding Robot gives your robots the ability to send and receive messages. This feature isn’t just about a new coding opportunity—it’s about preparing students to think in systems, build collaboration skills, and tackle problems the way professionals do.
Creating Systems Thinkers
At first glance, robot-to-robot communication and messaging might just look like another feature in AIM’s growing toolbox. But what it represents is a shift in how students experience robotics in the classroom. Instead of coding a single robot to complete a singular task, students can now design systems where robots communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with one another–just like the technology they encounter in the real world.
Think about self-driving cars that share traffic data to avoid accidents, warehouse robots that must account for other robots or obstacles in the packaging area, or drones that coordinate in swarms to deliver supplies or map disaster zones. These systems don’t operate in isolation, they rely on constant communication. By introducing robot-to-robot communication, you give students a way to model those same ideas in the safety and creativity of the classroom.
This is where systems thinking comes in. Rather than focusing only on what one robot can do, students must consider how multiple parts work together to achieve a bigger goal. They take those same concepts of decomposition and pseudocoding to turn a complex challenge into smaller roles for different robots. In addition, students must also design their own sort of “rules for communication” between robots to make the system reliable.
In doing so, students practice recognizing dependencies between the robots (and between other groups), planning for errors, and thinking about how changes in one part of the system affects the whole.
Take a look at this project using messaging. In this project, a message is sent with data from one robot to another. The receiving robot will only action the message if it is confirmed that:
- Robots are connected.
- A message is available.
This illustrates how the robots are dependent on one another in these messaging projects. The system created in this simple project ensures that no actions are taken unless conditions from both robots are met. From here, students could continue to add to the project to code behaviors specific to when those conditions (being connected and a message available) are not met.
Success relies not only on how the robots work together, but also on how student groups coordinate as part of the system.
Teaching Beyond the Code
By designing communication between robots, students begin to experience the same challenges and strategies that underpin modern computing systems. They also further develop the 21st century skills that we all need to thrive as citizens. Messaging pushes students to practice essential skills, starting with:
Collaboration and Communication
At its heart, messaging is about teamwork. Students must decide not only what messages the robots will exchange, but also how those messages will be understood. This mirrors the way human teams work—clear protocols, shared vocabulary, and agreed-upon expectations are critical. When students negotiate what a “go” or “stop” message means, they are practicing communication skills that extend beyond robotics.
The collaboration goes further than just a single group of students and their pair of robots. In many classrooms, one team might be coding Robot A while another team codes Robot B. Messaging becomes the bridge between their work. This requires students to step outside their own group and coordinate with others—aligning message formats, testing compatibility, and troubleshooting misunderstandings.
This code snippet, taken from the Receiving Messages example project in VEXcode, illustrates the message coordination that must also happen between students. Because the behaviors are different depending on what message is received (A or B), both groups of students would need to come to agreement on what each of those messages are labeled as and how to keep track of what causes each message and what happens when that message is received.
This collaboration is an authentic model of how large-scale projects happen in the real world, where different groups must design separate components that eventually work together. In that same vein, these projects are constantly iterating and evolving, requiring additional problem solving and resilience skills.
Problem Solving and Resilience
Robot messaging also challenges students to think on their feet when things don’t go as planned. A message might be delayed, a robot might disconnect, or the system may behave in unexpected ways based on the plan of the students. Instead of seeing these as failures, students can learn to treat them as opportunities to problem-solve. They develop resilience by building in retries through coding elements like loops, designing backup behaviors with else branches on their conditional statements, and testing their systems under different conditions. These experiences help students see that complex problems rarely have one “right” solution, but require flexibility, persistence, and iterative improvement. Learn more about building resilience in students through effective feedback in this article.
Through these experiences, robot messaging becomes a classroom tool that helps students build the collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and resilience they need to thrive in a world shaped by connected technologies.
Evolving How You Teach with Robots
Robot-to-robot messaging isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a shift in what students can experience in your classroom. It moves robotics projects from individual robots to systems of robots that collaborate and problem-solve together, opening the door to richer projects, deeper teamwork, and more authentic connections to the technologies shaping the world today.
For educators, this means more opportunities to create meaningful, student-centered learning. Messaging naturally encourages group projects where one team codes Robot A, another codes Robot B, and the two groups must coordinate their work. It prompts discussions about communication, resilience, and system design that extend far beyond robotics. Most importantly, it helps students see computing as something that connects people, ideas, and systems.
Today, there might be two AIM robots in your classroom. Tomorrow, it’s preparing students to design the networks of connected devices and intelligent systems that power our world.