Hi, my name is Jason McKenna. Welcome back to the VEX Studio, where it's my pleasure to introduce you to the last segment in our series discussing this wonderful book, "Hands On Minds On: How Executive Function, Motor and Spatial Skills, Foster School Readiness." In this last segment, we're going to talk with Dr. Claire Cameron, the author of the book, about key takeaways for educators. We're going to talk specifically about scenarios in which you would be building a VEX GO robot or coding a VEX 123 robot and the connection of those activities to the foundational skills of executive function, motor skills, and spatial skills.

Hopefully, at this point, after watching all the previous segments, you've learned how important those skills are and how they form the foundation for all future learning for our students. Now, you're going to see with this particular segment how you can connect those skills to using VEX in your classroom. That's why we refer to this as the key takeaways for educators, how VEX GO and VEX 123 can help foster school readiness by helping foster things like executive function, spatial, and motor skills.

Hopefully, you've enjoyed all of these segments. I really enjoyed this interview series with Dr. Cameron. I really enjoyed her book, and if you want to purchase the book, you can go to the Teachers College Press website as you see right here and purchase it. Use the code CAMERON to receive 15% off and free shipping.

Thank you so much for watching this video series. I think this is really great and important information for all of us as educators to be able to understand these foundational cognitive skills, how they can apply to our children, how we can foster these skills with our children, how we can help eliminate the achievement gap with these skills in some of our students, and how we can help pave the road to success, to future academic success with all of our students by using products like the VEX GO and VEX 123, to foster cognitive skills like motor skills, spatial skills, and executive function.

Thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciate it. If you have questions about any of the topics that we've discussed here, I would love to talk to you about it. In our Professional Learning Community, please ask questions. We love to engage in a conversation with you about it, about the book, and about the conversation with Dr. Claire Cameron. So thank you very much, and I'll see you again soon from the VEX Studio.

All right. Our eighth segment talking about this book, "Hands On Minds On Learning," with our special guest, Claire Cameron. Our last segment, key takeaways for teachers. Obviously, we want to make sure that teachers have something really tangible that they can take away, both from this book and from our interview series. So obviously, a lot of the teachers watching this work can be VEX teachers, and because we've talked a lot about these foundational skills for young students, I have VEX 123 and VEX GO out here.

So what I want to talk about is I just want to talk about a few scenarios that our teachers could find themselves in. As I talk about the scenarios, can you comment on how you can connect that to one of the foundational skills or maybe more that we've been discussing: executive function, motor skills, and spatial skills? So the first one I'll talk about is probably the most obvious one: following a set of build instructions to build one of these robots.

Sure. So classic copying constructional tasks, following instructions always involves working memory. And so for building a robot, it's really likely children will be using both their verbal working memory and their spatial or visual-spatial working memory as they imagine what will happen after a certain instruction is followed. And then backing up even more, you were kind enough to send me these materials, and I wanted to play with them right away, right?

So I think students are going to have that challenge as well. With any of these products, self-control is always going to be a factor because they're just so attractive and interesting. For spatial skills, matching the real-life pieces with the diagram, what the diagram shows, that's going to entail perceptual skills following the steps as directed. So that's the copying. And then for some of the activities, motor skills are involved, right?

I was putting my board together and realizing it was going to go together, but I needed to fit it just so and not get frustrated. The small connector pieces on the GO robot, you know, making sure all of those are connecting, they're grabbing them. They do seem sturdy, though. They are. It's a balance that we had to do because we wanted to make them soft enough that they can be manipulated by small fingers and small hands, but also sturdy enough that the robot wouldn't fall apart. We think we've done a pretty good job with that.

Moving on, in something like VEX 123, when I demo VEX 123 to teachers, one of the very first things I do is take a dry erase marker and draw a path on the field tile. The task is to have the robot move along the path. In our curriculum, we always ask the teachers to have the students verbalize that path back to them. So the robot has to move one square forward and then it has to turn. How far does it have to turn? Which direction does it turn? These are all the things that we try to prime the teacher to ask the students.

Can you talk about how that process is connected to executive function, spatial skills, or motor skills? Sure. Any sequence, following a sequence, understanding the sequence involves working memory, and we have to keep track of where the robot is in the sequence. We didn't talk earlier, but I'm really glad you brought up spatial language. Spatial language supports understanding of spatial concepts, and it's not one of the spatial skills I talked about, but it's certainly important. If students are using words, but then they're also using their hands, they're going to exercise cognitive flexibility as they switch back and forth between those modes. Some students will be strong in one area and some in another.

Let me see what else. I guess that's my list I have here. Well, the other thing, I was just doing a demo a few weeks ago. I actually got the code wrong. I forgot to have the robot turn when it was supposed to turn. I forgot to hit the push command on the robot. That's another great learning opportunity, having the teacher talk to the essence of what went wrong and connecting the behavior of the robot to the actual commands and then being able to verbalize all of that. That's obviously working memory, keeping track of all of that in your mind. Oftentimes, we have the students actually act it out with the robot, so the motor skills of doing that, the embodied cognition, all those things that we talked about there. That'll help them get really concrete about that sequence.

With their problem-solving, they might realize through acting it out like, oh yeah, I actually forgot to program that one turn, which is why the robot got stuck and ran into the wall. Something it didn't do what I wanted it to do. The other part about that obviously is executive function because, you know, we say all the time the robot's probably not going to do what you want it to do the first time, but still, kids will get frustrated or upset. One of the big learning barriers that you have to overcome is that the robot's only doing what you tell it to do. If you're frustrated, there's only one.

Thank you for your attention and for considering these insights. I hope this information proves helpful in your educational endeavors.

So it's not that the robot is broke. Instead, we have to examine the instructions that we actually gave the robot. Well, I got out this stuff with my dad, and we were trying to figure out why the sequence we programmed wasn't coming out. We went back to the instructions and realized that we needed to shake it to reset the previous sequence.

Now, those things, all of that, you know, is executive function, which is great.

Next one, teachers asking open-ended questions about a robot. For example, a teacher could be asking a student to describe where the pieces are on the robot or talk about if they built a robot on their own, why they did it. I saw this great example on Twitter last night. A teacher shared a Fun Frog build in VEX GO, where they teach a lifecycle using the build of a frog. A student actually added a tongue to the frog. It was one of the beams that would stick out of the frog. Having students describe that and do that can you talk about the connection to the foundational skills?

Well, first, I have to say I love that idea of building and then telling about it because it's a reflection opportunity we often forget to reflect on. But it's so important because it allows students to revisit the learning that happened, and that's going to reinforce the learning. If it's something cute, like adding a tongue to a frog, that's going to have an emotional connection that's then formed. Describing how they build the robot is going to use working memory as they think back to the steps they used. If you have students working in a group, maybe students have different memories of how it was built, and that's going to exercise cognitive flexibility.

Talking about how they built the robot or how they designed a certain sequence can be an opportunity to use spatial language. Teachers are going to want to encourage students to be as precise as possible. To use words like middle or diagonal, versus the more vague words like by pointing and saying there, that precision is also going to help strengthen the spatial skills.

It's so great that you mentioned that the computer science literature is really clear. Roy Pea, who is a researcher in computer science education, coined this term the superbug. The superbug is that students assume that coding languages carry the same characteristics as spoken languages. For example, if I tell someone to walk to the door, they're going to walk to the door and stop. I didn't tell them to stop, but they're just going to infer that I want them to stop. But you can't do that with a robot. You have to be very, very precise with what it is that you want it to do. We refer to that as the decomposition, being very precise and identifying the exact behaviors that you want your robot to do and then associating those behaviors with the actual commands from the coding language.

I was happy to hear you talk about how the preciseness is important for the spatial reasoning because it's important for getting the robot to do what we wanted to do from a coding perspective.

Well, and that's also what I appreciate about having these commands here. Coder cards, yeah. Coder cards are going to lighten the cognitive load. The other way to lighten cognitive load is you referred to drawing the path to the board. That means the student doesn't have to keep all of that in their minds. The concrete representation of it is out there, and they can use their cognitive resources for other things.

Now, you touched upon this a little bit earlier, but obviously, students working collaboratively, students working collaboratively, build a robot, students working collaboratively to code the robot, students working collaboratively to explain what the robot is doing. That obviously has a lot of benefits to these foundational skills.

Yes. So collaborative work takes our social emotional learning skills, self-control or self-management, emotion recognition in self and others, realizing, "Oh, I'm getting frustrated. Maybe I need to walk away for a second." We have to allow our peers to do tasks that maybe we're excited to do. We need cognitive flexibility because somebody may want to go about something a different way, and if we can persist through that discomfort, we may realize that their way was just as good as what we were planning to do.

Collaboratively building a robot also requires the spatial skills of perceptual skills and noticing. Some students might notice the details more than others, but they might not be the loudest ones. Building a robot, as we already talked about, requires constructional skills, transformational skills. And when we're working collaboratively again, that's a place for a lot of spatial language, a lot of precise spatial language.

One last thing, I didn't have it on my list, but you talked about it earlier, so I'll mention that there's learning STEM and then there's using STEM to learn. So this idea of having students, one of my favorite STEM labs that we have is with the VEX 123 robot, and they have to code the robot to go to grandma's house. It's a play off of Little Red Riding Hood. So they use the sensor, and if they detect a wolf because the wolf is colored red, they turn around and go the other direction. But if they don't see red, then they go to grandma's house.

Connecting computer science to literacy like that or having the students decorate the robot with the art ring and then having them write a story about it, as you mentioned earlier, can make the learning more meaningful because it's more engagement. It's more, we use the term touch points for the literacy lesson. Those are just all ways to bring these subjects more to life.

Yeah. So what in the neuroscience language, we're creating more neural connections. Yes. There's more points of connection. More meaning is attached to a given activity because you're expanding beyond just the concepts in the learning opportunity.

Well, thank you very much. This has been a wonderful conversation. You wrote an amazing book that I highly recommend everyone to go out and get. I learned so much from this book, not just about the actual executive function, spatial skills, and all those things in the book, but also just how they all work together and the impact that they have on students. So I can't thank you enough for writing this book, and I can't thank you for joining us here and chatting with us about it.

Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Great. Thank you for joining us again in the VEX Studio, and we will see you again soon.