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Hello and welcome to the VEX Classroom and welcome to Teaching with VEX GO. My name is Audra. Throughout this video course, we're going to walk through some of the ways that you can get to know your kit. This way, you can become comfortable and confident in building with VEX GO pieces so that when you bring this to your students, you are not scared by it, they are not scared by it. Everybody is excited, and you have successful STEM learning happening in your classroom.

Sometimes people take a look at the VEX GO kit and they go, oh my gosh, there's so many pieces. Yes, there are a lot of pieces, but the trick to getting started is to start slow and simple. That's exactly what we're going to do in this course. We're going to start with a few pieces at a time so that you can get comfortable and familiar with how the pieces go together, how build instructions work, so that as you move on to more complex building, you are ready to go, you are comfortable, you're confident, and you're ready to be successful with VEX GO in your classroom.

So to get started, all you will need for this video is one VEX GO kit. Okay, so what does one kit consist of? It is two boxes. You have a box that has all of your beams, plates, and building materials here, and you can see that they're all color-coded and sorted within this kit box. We'll talk a little more about that as we start working with these pieces. That has bin one, and in bin two or box two, you have a couple more connectors. You have your jewel boxes with all of your tiny pieces like your pins. You also have the pin tool, wheels, discs, the brain, the battery, motors, switches, things like that. We're not going to get to any of those electronics anytime in the near future, so you don't have to worry about those. We're largely just going to focus on the building pieces. Okay? So all you need are your two kit pieces.

We are going to use the "Get Ready...Get VEX...GO!" storybook, which if you would like to follow along on your own, will be linked down below. You can use that link on another tab or another device at home. But we'll also be showing it here so this way you can stay focused on one screen. All right, so let's get started.

To begin with, we're going to introduce you to your VEX GO kit the same way that you would introduce your students to it, using a storybook. This is a very familiar situation for many, many educators, right? We're all used to introducing new topics or new things with a story. Within the "Get Ready...Get VEX...GO!" book, not only will students be introduced to the VEX GO kit, they will be introduced to Colonel Joe, the VEX GO mascot, who is also a little character that can be built from pieces in your kit. Within your kit, there's a little bag that has the pieces to build Colonel Joe. You can rename it to something else if you would like, or you can create a little Colonel Joe of your very own. I've built mine here. There are places for Joe to live in your kit all the time so that way you don't lose Joe. But we've got a little Colonel Joe there.

Colonel Joe will help us to learn a little bit about the kinds of things that we can do with VEX GO. When you read this story to your students, you can show them some of the things they can do. You'll see some things that we're also going to do throughout this course, like building some super cars and things like that. But the thing that we want to focus on in this story today is building this character right here. As you can tell, Colonel Joe is an astronaut. Our story says, I always say the best way to learn about VEX GO is to use VEX GO. So are you ready to build something together with your group? Hopefully, the answer is yes. That's why you're here. As an astronaut, I've built lots of robots to help me on my missions. This is one of my first creations. I named this robot J.O.S.H.

Thank you for joining us on this journey to explore VEX GO. We hope you find this course helpful and inspiring as you bring STEM learning to your classroom. Happy building!

For Joe's original special helper, this very simple build is what we're going to use to get you acquainted with your kit in the same way that you would get your students acquainted with their kit.

For the purposes of this video, we are going to use the digital version of this book. One thing you might notice is that this book is provided as a printable PDF. You can print it to any size, shape, color, or situation you want for your students. You can project it, giving you a lot of freedom and flexibility with how you share this storybook with your students.

And you can even do something like what we're going to do now, where I'm projecting the story for you so that I can zoom in on things and highlight some features within the illustration.

So this is the page we left off on, and now we are going to go to the next page so that we can start to build our very own J.O.S.H. You have an introduction to build instructions here within this book that gives you illustrations to show you some things about how you can build and how build instructions come together.

To begin with, it says first we'll start with a green connector and two green angle beams. If I zoom in a little bit here, you can see very clearly the pieces that are pictured that we will need from our kit. You will also see on each build instruction page not only the pieces that we need but also how they're going to come together.

If I zoom in a little bit here, you can see that we have things like these pink lines that go around each piece that show the connection and how these pieces are going to come together. You can also notice the orientation of the pieces. Here, there's a flat side to this green connector that's on the top, and there's also a side that has a little divot and a cutout, and that is on the bottom.

We want to make sure that we're looking really carefully at each of these build instructions so that we know exactly how our pieces come together. Each build page will give us the ability to see how the pieces come together, as well as the finished product of what this step should look like so that we can compare what we see in the build instructions to what we have in our hands or, for you, also what you see in my hands in the video.

So let's get started. To begin with, we need to find a green connector and two green angle beams. Now I'm going to leave those instructions in the corner and go to my kit. I have both of my bins open so that it's easy to get to everything.

The first thing is the green connector. To find those green connectors, they're here in the center. You can see how if I hold it up close to the camera, you can see how one side has a little bit of a notch and the other side is flat, and there are connector pins on the outside of both sides of this piece.

Something that you'll notice about VEX GO is that in order for pieces to come together, you need to have not only the beam and the plate but also some kind of a connector or a pin that is going to hold them together. Just like when you build with real materials, right? You don't just stick two pieces of wood together. You use a nail or a screw to hold them. In VEX GO, we use pins, connectors, standoffs, and things like that.

To begin with, we need one green connector and two green angle beams. We have our two green angle beams right here, and I can see them in the kit easily. I have two angle beams and my green connector. Now, if I look over here at how these pieces go together, I can carefully hold my green connector in the same way that it's shown in the image in the book. Then I can do the same thing for each of these green angle beams. I can see that the pink line and the pink dot are in the top hole of my angle beam, and that's going to connect right here so I can snap it on and hear that snap sound.

Thank you for joining us in this instructional video. We hope you found it helpful and engaging.

If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. Happy building!

Now I'm gonna do the same thing for the other green angle beam on the right side in order to make J.O.S.H.'s leg. So again, I can line it up the same way it's pictured. Put that first hole to the green connector and snap it on. And now I can compare what I've built here with what I see in the build instructions, right? So make sure that this looks exactly the same as that. I can look and see the flat side of my green connectors on the top. My two legs are together, they're facing opposite sides, some great built-in baked-in spatial reasoning that we can do here.

So you might wanna pause, snap your pieces together. Anytime we're building here you can pause this video in order to snap your own pieces together or to look at something a little bit more closely. I will try to pause after each step just to give you a second to make sure that what you have in your hands matches what I have in mind.

All right, so now that we've built the legs we can go onto the next page.

Okay, so now when we turn the page we can see that next we're going to add an orange connector. Just like we saw with that green connector, there are different sides to the orange connector. You can see that it has a flat side on one end and it has that little side on the back that has a notch. So we can pay attention to those things as we're gathering pieces from our kit. Then we will figure out how we are going to connect the orange connector into our green connector.

Let's now go find the orange connector within our kit. So our orange connector is going to be in the same bin with your motors and electronics. And it is right over here next to the motors. So we can see this looks similar to that green connector, right? It has pins on the end, it's got the flat side but it's a little bit bigger. It'll be used in a little bit different ways and it has that notched side.

So now if I zoom in here for you on our build instructions we can follow these pink lines to know that we want to send our green connector and our orange connector together following those pink lines on the page. So if I orient my build here the same way that it is on the page, I have the flat part of my green connector up. I have the flat side of my orange connector facing the legs and then these pins on the bottom of the orange connector are going to go right into the holes on the green connector and I can push them in and snap them in together.

Sometimes when, especially when you have new pieces, snapping those two things together takes a little bit of energy, a little bit of fine motor skills, a little finger strength. So you wanna make sure that your students are equipped to do that. This is also a great way to practice those fine motor skills because that finger grip strength will also help them as they're learning to write or practicing handwriting and things like that as well.

So now that I've connected these two pieces together I can look at the completed step in the build instructions and compare it to what I have here. So you can snap your piece together and compare what you see in my hands to what you have in your hands to what we see on the book page.

All right, and now we'll go to the next step.

So now for this next step we're going to get into adding J.O.S.H.'s arms. So here we're going to see two yellow angle beams that we're going to use, but we also have a green pin and I want to zoom in on this so that you can see there is a short side to this pin and a long side to this pin. So we wanna make sure that when we're orienting the pin into our build that we're paying attention to which side connects with which piece.

So let's find our green pin and our two yellow angle beams. To start with, our green pin is going to be inside of this jewel case right here that has your red pins and your yellow standoffs. So we're gonna open that carefully.

Sometimes they are a little bit tight, especially when they're brand new. So you may want to open your little jewel cases on top of the lid of your kit or on a little bowl or something just to make sure that if pieces happen to go in a couple of different directions, they're easy to gather and find.

We're going to take out one green pin from here and then we can put that jewel case back in there. I'll hold this up so that you can see it has just like the image in the book. It has a short side and a long side, and we're going to pay attention to that when we start building. We also need two yellow angle beams which are going to be over here. So we can grab two yellow angle beams from this side of our kit.

Something you may notice as I take pieces out, if we look underneath them, we can see an image of the pieces that are in that particular area of the kit. This way, when we take things out, it's easy to figure out where they go back, which we will talk more about when we take apart J.O.S.H. in the next video. So now I have my two yellow angle beams and my green pin.

Let's zoom in here on our build instructions to see how these things are going to go together because now we're going to connect three different pieces together. We can see that our green pin is oriented with the short side facing the orange connector and the long side facing the yellow angle beams. Our yellow angle beams are going in two different directions, so we have one angled this way and one angled that way. We can hold our green pin in the same orientation. We can then hold our one yellow angle beam in the same orientation and our second, so we can kind of line them up the same way they are in that image.

Now I'm going to start by putting the long end of my green pin through both yellow angle beams. I can see from the pink line that the green pin needs to go in that first hole right there. I can push that all the way through. When you push your first one through, the short side should be in the back, and then you should still have some remaining room on that green pin to stick the second one. Now when I put my second yellow angle beam on, it is also going in that very first hole. But remember, it's the other way so that J.O.S.H. has arms on both sides. Now we've put that part together.

If we look again back at our image, we can see this pink line that's showing that all of this is going to connect into the center hole on our orange connector and on the same side as the leg. When we snap that together and move over to look at the completed step, I can now see that what I have in my hands matches what we see in the book. We can hold it in the same direction and orientation and also should match what you have in your hands.

All right, moving on to the next step. In the next step, we're going to give J.O.S.H. a head. In order to do that, we're going to use an orange pulley just because it has that circle shape that is similar to a head and another green connector. We can see if we look closely here that our orange pulley has some holes on it, right? It has some ways to be connected to other pieces. We are going to use those holes in order to connect our pieces together.

First, let's find our orange pulley and another green connector, and then we'll connect our head. To start with, we need our orange pulley, which is up at the top of this bin in between some other kinds of connectors. We'll see it is a round shape with some holes in the middle. So we need that pulley. Do you remember where the green connector was? We took one out earlier right in the center of this other bin. We're going to grab that other connector.

Now we can look closely at how these two pieces are going to come together. They're not connecting to the body of J.O.S.H. just yet. We're just using these two pieces.

Thank you for following along with this build. We hope you enjoy creating J.O.S.H. and exploring all the possibilities with your kit. Stay tuned for more exciting projects in our next video!

So we can look here and see that we're going to connect to the bottom holes when we've turned our pulley so that the holes are on the bottom. Bottom holes to the green connector piece. And this time we want it with the divot and the bumps on the top. So we want the flat side on the bottom and we want the divot on the top.

So I'm going to hold my pulley so that I have holes on the bottom. I can hold my connector so that the bumpy part with the pin of it is on the top. And then I'm going to connect the green connector to the orange pulley and just push it together. There we go. So now I can hold it again to compare it to what I see in the book. I've got my orange pulley, my green connector, and I'm ready to go for the last step.

Okay, so we are onto our very last step. So now we are going to connect J.O.S.H.'s head to the rest of J.O.S.H.'s body. So we're going to use the two pieces that we have built in order to connect them. Now if we look really closely at this instruction, you will notice that we are looking at the back side of J.O.S.H., right? The arms are connected on the front, but we are looking at this side with the divots here with extra connector pieces here. We're looking at the back side of the head where the green connector is. So we wanna make sure that we're paying attention to that when we wanna put our pieces together.

So now going to hold J.O.S.H. the same way that J.O.S.H. is oriented in our book, in our build instructions. And we can see we have the arms facing down and the back of J.O.S.H. facing up. And now we have the orange pulley for the head with the green connector right there. And we can see that following those pink lines, these two pins of the orange connector are going to go into the green connector. We are going to snap it together. And ta-da, when we finish that now we have a J.O.S.H. that looks just like the J.O.S.H. in the book.

And you can see that the way the arms and legs are connected means that they can move a little bit. We can make J.O.S.H. do a little dance. It can stand, it can wave hello. It can do all sorts of fun things.

Congratulations, you just created your very first VEX GO build and it was that simple, right? We just used carefully chosen pieces from the kit, followed the build instructions, and snapped pieces together. This is not a real complicated build, but it's a great way to get started.

So now that you've gotten started, the next video we'll talk about what to do after you've built something and wanna take it apart.

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