I recently had a conversation with a teacher who was just beginning to teach with VEX IQ. She had a very specific question: What can I do to help my middle school students, who are inexperienced builders, become comfortable with building? This conversation reminded me that we sometimes take students’ building experience for granted. It is easy to assume that by the time students reach later elementary years, they have had experiences building with a variety of materials both at home and in the classroom. However, this is not always the case. There are many students who have not had those early building experiences, and therefore have not had as much opportunity to build their spatial reasoning skills, which are essential for success with building.

Fortunately, we have a variety of resources to help teachers support students of all ages who are novice builders. This article includes a series of very scaffolded activities that can be used to meet students where they are, and provide them with gradual, incremental success with building. Implementing these activities will give students the ability to experience success with building, by starting simply. Sequencing these successes can help grow students’ confidence in themselves as ‘builders’, and in their ability to build with IQ more specifically. 

Start with Activities

One approach that can be helpful for novice builders is to get them started building using Activities, rather than jumping right into a STEM Lab and building a robot. One great place to start is with our Discovery Activities. Although these are part of the VEX GO curriculum, they can easily be adapted for use with the IQ Kit. 

These activities use a set of 12 Beams and Plates and are designed to be very quick Activities that promote spatial reasoning, practice spatial skills, and get students acclimated to the pieces in their Kits. Although the activities are designed for pieces from the VEX GO Kit, you could very easily substitute Beams and Plates from the VEX IQ Kit, as pictured here. These 10 Activities require very little prep and each one can be done in 15 minutes or less, making them a very accessible way to build students' confidence. Check out this video from the PD+ Video Library, to learn more about spatial skill development with Discovery Activities.

Another IQ Activity that can help students get acclimated to the Kit is the Scavenger Hunt Activity. In this Activity, students are challenged to use the IQ Interactive Parts Poster as a tool to help them look through their Kit and find IQ pieces that serve certain purposes, such as to create angles in a build.

Try an Activity Series

Once students have completed some Discovery Activities and the Scavenger Hunt, they could move on to a fun free-building Activity like Tallest Tower Challenge, in which they are challenged to use ten pieces from the kit to build the tallest tower they can. This Activity helps students practice building with Pins and Connectors. And, we have a video from the VEX IQ Robot Games online camp that students can watch ahead of time, or even build along with. In that video, we emphasize how to build with stability, understanding center of mass, and how to make different types of connections with pieces from the kit.

As a next step, students could move into slightly more complex free-building using the VEX GO Animal Rescue Activity Series. This series can also be used with IQ pieces. To help avoid confusion caused by the colorful GO pieces, print the Activities in the series in black and white. Once students have completed this series, the IQ Space Adventure Activity Series will introduce slightly more complex free-building challenges, without being overwhelming. Using these two series’ together provides a very scaffolded approach that will allow students to enjoy themselves while growing their understanding of building with IQ. This VEX Library Article, Facilitating Engineering Conversations with Students, provides valuable prompts you can use when circulating through the room assisting students while they build.

Use the 3D Build Instructions

When you begin your first STEM Lab with students, make your students aware of our 3D Build instructions, as some students may prefer using them to the step-by-step PDF build instructions. These instructions can be found on builds.vex.com.

3D Build instructions include animations that show how the pieces attach to one another in each step. They also allow students to manipulate and rotate the view for each step of the instructions, so students can view it from any angle, making it much easier to understand how to complete it. 

With this progression, you can build the confidence of novice builders before ever approaching a STEM Lab Unit. Ensuring students have developed their building abilities enough to feel assured of their success when building their first robots can help avoid frustration and focus on learning the valuable engineering and coding concepts in the IQ STEM Labs.