(gentle upbeat music)

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the VEX classroom. My name is Audra and today you'll notice that the VEX classroom looks a little bit different than it usually does because today we're gonna talk about Building a VEX 123 Learning Center. So we've gone ahead and built one in our classroom. Now, as I'm sure you know, there are many, many, many, many ways that you can build a learning center within your classrooms. So this is just one example to kind of show you some of the things that you may wanna include that would enhance your students' experiences and really set you up for success with a learning center in your classroom.

So, what will make your learning center successful? An engaging learning center is one that you really want students to be able to use as independently as possible, right? So we want students to be able to know how to navigate it, how to take turns. This way, your level of facilitation is kind of minimal. You can introduce it and say, at the learning center today, we're gonna have this activity and students can go from there. In order for that to happen with the VEX 123 Learning Center, you really wanna make sure that your students are grounded in how to use VEX 123. So before you set them off in the learning center to kind of roam free, you wanna make sure that they have a grounding and a foundation of what VEX 123 is, how to use it, how to take turns, and what are your robot rules.

A great way to do this is to do the meet your robot Stem Lab unit together as a whole class. This will give your students an opportunity to think about what is a robot, how to use the touch buttons. It gives you an opportunity to develop some robot rules and things of that nature. So this way you have a level playing field and you've established a shared language and shared foundation of experience for when students come into the learning center.

Another thing that will help set them up for success is a bit of tour guiding, kind of like what we're gonna do today in this video. Before you let your students just go and do things, you wanna make sure that they understand what is in the learning center and how to use it. You don't wanna over-complicate your learning center and give students things that they're not going to use in that particular activity. We wanna make it so this way, they have everything that they need, but that's also a manageable amount of materials. This will save you from having to do massive cleanup at the end of the day and help your students to stay focused and using the learning center for the kind of learning that you wanna do.

So let's talk about what's included in our learning center. Building a learning center to me was always a really, really wonderful fun time to be a teacher 'cause you got to think about kind of that intersection of aesthetics and content and organization, and a really well-organized learning center will run smoothly with minimal maintenance for a long period of time. So let's talk about some of the things that you will wanna think about and maybe include in your learning center.

Depending on the kind of space that you have in your classroom, that will obviously determine how many students are able to work in your center at a time. In our classroom right now, we've got it set up for two groups. This could be two individual students or two pairs of students. We've also established a Sign Up for our learning center, and this is really important. VEX 123 is gonna be an exciting part of your classroom. Hopefully, everybody wants to use it all the time. So in order to help kind of maintain students' rhythm with this, either you can establish a sign up or how students sign up and pick their centers throughout the day. In our sign up, we've used some art ring name tags, which serve kind of double duty here.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope this helps you in setting up your own VEX 123 Learning Center. Happy teaching!

So you could do this with a pocket chart or extra name tag slots. We've got our art ring canvas name tags. As students come to use the learning center, they'll take their name tag off and put it on their art ring. This also establishes turn-taking routines. When my name is on the art ring, it's my turn to press the buttons.

Next up, now that students know who's using the learning center, we want them to know what they're doing in the learning center. This is a critical piece. You want to have just one activity at the learning center happening at a time. Since this is a place where small groups of children will be working, you can do this in a way that enables you to differentiate instruction. You can switch out activities frequently, but you want to have one activity or one group of activities for the week, and you can keep those in a pocket.

Something I used to do in my classroom was, when we had an in-service day or I had a little bit of extra time, I would print off a whole bunch of activities and stick them all in the pocket. This way, when it came time to change or I needed something new, they were right there at my fingertips. We've got our activity of the week, and that's central so that all students in every group can see this. This way, it's very clear what's happening and what we're doing.

The goal of this activity is this Pathfinder. So, what are the materials that I need? I need a tile, a robot, and a dry erase marker. I have a tile, a robot, and a dry erase marker. And that's it. I don't have anything else that I won't need. There are other things that will help your students complete this activity, like printables. The printables come in handy here.

Right now, our center is set up for using the touch interface. We've got printables around the touch buttons, planning and motion planning, and planning a project using the touch buttons. This way, students can use these. There are markers and pencils right here for them to fill out these worksheets. As they're working, if students are stuck, you can come over, grab one, give it to your students, and move on from there. Keep those resources that students need without overwhelming them.

We also have our saved projects. If somebody is stuck on something, but there's a saved project that you know might help them, you can offer that to students. This gives students an impetus to fill out these printables accurately and take pride in them because, ooh, maybe my project will get added to the saved project file, and I can share that with other people. This can become your project archive and a moment of pride for students to take ownership of what they've been doing.

Let's talk about some of the other things that we see in our learning center. These would all be optional items. We've got our VEX 123 poster. This is a great thing to have up here because it will help your students keep track of all the different language, the coder cards when they're using the coder, and what the touch buttons do. It's a great grounding feature that's part of your learning center.

We also have some big touch buttons since our activity is around touch buttons. If I need to help students plan a project and I want to work with a group, I might use my big touch buttons that I've printed out and laminated and add them to my learning center. I also have the Meet Your Robot storybook. This is a great way to keep students engaged and remind them about the things you talked about in that meet your robot unit.

It's just a good extra additional item that can be there as a resource. We also have up here, 123 Current Events. This could be images or documentation of students' words, things about what you've been doing in the classroom. Here we see pictures of us learning about the Meet Your Robot Stem Lab. Oh, look when Sam and his mom came into the classroom the other day, we showed her how our 123 robot works and then took a picture and put it up there. These images are just another great way for students to revisit their learning, remember what they've done together, and keep all of that fresh and ongoing.

Last but not least, in between our two settings, you will see our Robot Rules. If you did the Meet Your Robot Stem Lab unit in lab two, you've established a set of robot rules. We want these front and center all the time so that students can constantly be reminded of not only the ways to use their robot but also the ways to care for their robot and how to use their robot together.

Now that we've talked about establishing this 123 learning center from the beginning, one of the things you will want to do throughout the course of the year, each week, or every few days, depending on the flow in your classroom, is to maintain your learning center. This way, you can keep it fresh and keep students engaged. But if you're anything like me, I don't have the time to completely overhaul my learning center every week. This is where that organization piece comes in. If you've organized your learning center, maintaining it and switching things up should be a quick and easy process.

Now we've finished this first activity, and my students are ready for something different. At a base level, I can just pull that out. I've got my next activity ready to go. I can look quickly and say, oh, this uses the same materials: markers, tile, robot. We're all set. I can keep the same printables and all of those things the same.

One thing that I generally kept in my learning center was some kind of little hidden teacher basket; my teacher bag of tricks. This way, as students were working, if there were things that I needed to extend an experience or reminders, I could keep them high up so that they're out of reach of students, but so that I could use them and grab them. It's another way to keep things going.

We've also added our little 123 character here, which can be really helpful to add little reminders during your learning center time. Vector P robots in our... He's in our learning center. I wonder what he's telling us today. This can be a cue for you and your students to notice, oh, something's new, something's different. Here's our reminder. Remember, you can press my buttons only when I'm wearing your name. This way, you can use Vector P robot to lean into the theme and have your students reminded of good practices and good coding experiences.

Now let's say you wanted to switch from touch to coder. This would also be a very easy thing to do. We would once again switch out our activity and have a coder activity. I look and see, okay, I'm gonna need coders and coder cards. My base setup can stay the same. Then I can add a coder to each station so that my students are ready to go. I can add the coder cards that they will need to accomplish this activity.

Here's something critical. We have a lot of coder cards in our coder card set. We generally do not want to give students every single coder card. It's a great way for things to get lost or broken, and for students to become unfocused in what they're doing. Give them just the coder cards they need to accomplish the activity.

So this way they can stay focused, they can do what they need to do. I look at my activity, I say, oh, this one so needs pom-poms. And maybe I wanna give my students an opportunity to use the art ring a little bit more. So now there's just one more tray of things. We've got pom-poms, we've got some art ring canvases, we have some extra materials that they might be ready for since they're now doing coder things.

Now, additionally, I'd wanna switch out my printable. So this way they all become the coder part printables. But again, that's a quick and easy way to make that switch. You can, instead of touch buttons, add large coder cards to your center. You can still keep your Meet Your Robot book, but you can kind of easily and simply keep things going.

A great thing when you're using the coder to keep in your little teacher bag of tricks are some extra coder cards, things like the go-to start card or sound and glow cards. So that way as students finish, you can just give them one more thing to kind of keep them going a little bit, to kind of get some of that iteration going. Oh, hey, I wonder what would happen if you added this card to your project? What do you think happens when you add this card to the end of your project? Let's experiment and see. So that gives you an opportunity to do some differentiation for students. So maybe you have one group that's really ready for an additional challenge, you have one group that's not, they don't need to know about those cards. You can kind of just give them to the kids that are ready for them. So this way you can make the most of being able to work in these small groups that learning centers afford you.

And last but not least, you want your learning center to be a place of shared learning. You want this to be a place where students come together, they get excited about what they're doing, they're excited to share their learning with their peers. This is a great space to partner two children together. Maybe one has a little stronger grasp on the coding concept and another was absent for a day so you can partner them together. This way students can begin to do some reteaching for one another. That helps them to articulate their thinking, it helps them to kind of solidify their learning and it makes it really fun for both students to be a part of that group.

You wanna call attention to things like your saved projects. So maybe you have a my saved project day, and every third Friday of the month, the learning center transitions to have, everybody's gonna pick a project that they've never seen before. Some project that another student has done and test it out and iterate on it. What do you notice about this project? What would you add to it? So that way you can kind of keep that going. Do you have any questions for the person who made this project? Go ask them that question to kind of keep your language flowing, keep the conversation around learning going, and keep students really engaged and excited about what they're doing.

VEX 123 is a great tool to learn coding, but it's also a great tool to use coding to learn other things. So you can use your learning center to help scaffold students learning about literacy, about phonics, about counting and one-to-one correspondence, about doing basic math. Maybe you're working on some subtraction problems. So you put a number line activity in your learning center. This way students can continue to work on those math concepts, but with their 123 robots. So that you're really getting that kind of cross-curricular element to your learning center and you're building a place where students go and they know how to use the materials. It's a very easy place to interact with, and it's a place that you can keep exciting all year long.

Now, as we said when we first started out, there were about a thousand different ways that you can build a learning center in your classroom. So this was just one way, and hopefully, this is a good jumping-off point for you.

We'd love to see the learning centers that are popping up all over the country, all over the world. So please share some images, some stories, some success stories.

If you have any questions about how to make your learning center work well, or maybe you feel like it's getting a little bit tired, what are some things you can do to jazz it up? Please post that in the Professional Learning Community. That's what it is there for.

We would love to see all of the wonderful things that you and your students are doing with VEX 123.

(gentle upbeat music)