Engineering Essentials: Laying the Foundation with VEX IQ
Embark on an enlightening journey into the realm of engineering with this VEX IQ live session. This session covers how teachers of novice students can get started with engineering, what more experienced students can do to take the next step with their engineering, and finally best practices in teaching engineering. Watch today and pave the way for a future generation of budding engineers in your classroom.
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Hi, welcome to the VEX Classroom. My name is Jason McKenna. It's a pleasure to be with you here today where today's topic for our Live Session, you can see here we're going to be talking about Engineering with VEX IQ. Now, this is something, to be honest with you, I struggled a lot with when I was an educator. As a teacher in the classroom, I did a lot better with the coding aspect of STEM than I did with engineering. So this is something that's always been kind of near and dear to my heart, which is, how do you prepare teachers in classrooms to help facilitate students when they want to be able to build something and they want to be able to build creations on their own and collaborate with their friends and be able to do all of that fun stuff that we really love in a STEM classroom?
So what I want to take you through today in our live session is number one, engineering for novices. So if you've got a group of students, maybe like, you know, fourth, fifth, or sixth grade students around that age range that have never built anything before with VEX IQ, how do you scaffold that experience for them? And of course, what if you have more experienced students? What if you have students that have been building for years, engineering for years, and you kind of want to take them to the next level? What can you do to facilitate that process? And then thirdly, how do you actually teach engineering? And how do you actually teach the students the skills they need in order to be able to do engineering and building with your VEX IQ system effectively? We're going to talk about all three of those things during the live session today.
If you have any questions during our live session, feel free to throw them in the chat. We'll go through and answer. I'll stop and pause a few times and answer the questions as they come up. And I'll leave some time at the end of the live session to answer whatever questions that you may have. Of course, this is being recorded, so if you have to leave early or whatever, don't worry about it. This will be posted in VEX Professional Development Plus. You always have the opportunity to re-watch this video. Or if you have to leave early, watch another part of it. Or if you feel like you know your friend who's also a member, your co-teacher that's a member of VEX PD+ would really get a lot out of this video, you can obviously let them know about it.
All of these great conversations that we're having around coding and around STEM and around engineering with VEX IQ, you can have these same discussions in our professional learning community. So if you have a question, you don't want to ask it now, you want to wait to ask it in a professional learning community, you can do that. If you have a comment, you can certainly do that. Ask those questions in the professional learning community.
Now, one thing I will say, from the very top and all of my travels, you know, in my capacity with VEX all over the world, one of the main questions I always get about building and engineering with VEX IQ or EXP or V5 or even VEX GO, is what do I do about classroom storage? How do I handle classroom storage? What do I do about, you know, parts that are missing? Do I make a parts inventory list? What do I do about that? And our professional learning community is the perfect place to ask that question because there is no one answer for it. If there was one answer, believe me, we'd have it in our VEX library. We'd have a STEM Lab that talked about it. We'd have all this information that talked about. But every classroom is different, whether it's from the size of the classroom, the amount of kits that you have, the amount of students you have in your classroom, the amount of kids you have sharing your kits. Every classroom dynamic is different, every school is different.
So it is impossible for me to say this is the one way or the one methodology that you should be storing or keeping track of all of your VEX IQ pieces. But we have a lot of great suggestions and great examples in our professional learning community. So if you've joined this live session, or if you're watching a recording and you're like, how do I store and how do I keep track of all these VEX IQ pieces? Ask that question in our professional learning community. Matt, our in-house engineer here in our office, will help answer that question. There are other teachers that will chime in and answer with that.
Some teachers keep everything in their kits. I spent some time in December of last year down at Dallas ISD. My man, Omar Cortez, has a great way that he keeps track of all of his kits in the back of his classroom. He has storage to be able to do that. Other people take all the pieces out so all their connectors are in one bin, all of their beams are in another bin, whatever it is. There are different ways to do it, again, based upon whatever your classroom dynamics are. So ask that question in the community and we'll get you the help that you need.
Okay, engineering for novices. Now about, oh gosh, going about eight years ago now, I had one of the very first VEX IQ robots in my classroom. I actually, you know, at the time I was one of the beta testers for VEX IQ Gen 1 when it first came out. So when it did, the first thing I had my students do was build this Clawbott. Now, it wasn't this Clawbott, 'cause this is a Gen 2 Clawbot, but they built the first generation VEX IQ Clawbot, because it really wasn't another alternative. That was what you did. You kind of built the Clawbot and you got started with it.
Some students, some groups of students, it took them about a day or two to build the Clawbot. I had other students, it took them a week and a half to build a Clawbot. That, of course, presented a lot of challenges for me as a teacher. What do I do with those other kids that take longer? What do I do with the kids that, you know, don't take quite as long? How do I scaffold that experience for the students? But I'm going to get into that in a minute. We have some resources to help with that.
But before that, I want to talk about the why. Why do you have some students that can build this Clawbot or another contraption with VEX quickly, easily, no problem at all, but you have other students that struggle? Why is that? What is going on there? And the misconception that a lot of people have amongst both adults and students is that you have some students, they're just naturally good at engineering. They're just naturally good at putting things together. They're good with their hands or whatever that particular vernacular is. And you have other students that are not.
But of course, we know from educational research, there's no such thing as an engineering brain. There's no such thing as a math brain. There's no such thing as a humanities brain for that matter. The biggest predictor for the success or lack of success of your students, when it comes time for them to do something like build a robot, follow build instructions to build a robot like this, is the amount of background knowledge that they bring to that classroom. This exists for any domain, not just engineering, right? The amount of background knowledge that you bring into a classroom determines your success or lack of success in the classroom. It's the number one predictor.
That's why here in the U.S. we spend our tax dollars on things like Sesame Street, Public Broadcasting. So students that maybe aren't in a situation at home where they're taught sight words or they're taught numbers, they can get those things from public television, learn their letters and sounds and numbers and all of that.
Thank you for joining us today and for being part of our community. We appreciate your dedication to learning and teaching. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out.
We look forward to seeing you in our next session. Take care and happy building!
So when they come into kindergarten, there's not this big huge gap between them and the students that have parents who might read to them every single day. In those households, words and letters are rich and ever-present. We aim to close that gap because we know how important background knowledge is. If you have students who have never built something following instructions, never connected pins and beams together, they are going to struggle when it comes to following build instructions to create something like the VEX IQ Clawbot. Students who are encouraged at home to take things apart and put them back together are naturally going to excel at this.
What we've designed in our curriculum are various activities to scaffold the process. I have some examples here to show you. As an educator, I initially thought it was easier to get started by following build instructions, but I was wrong. Following the build instructions is actually more difficult for students compared to giving them an activity like building a sign or a flag. This simple activity introduces standoffs, connectors, pins, and beams to the students. It's a free build they can do on their own, which helps them get used to connecting things together, finding pieces, and assembling them, ensuring success in the classroom.
From this simple activity, we can progress to something like "Build A House," where students are introduced to corner connectors. They learn to connect things at ninety-degree angles, moving from basic assembly to more complex structures. As you can see, the pieces inside are doing the corner connections, scaffolding the experience for students. Next, they might build a wheelbarrow, adding a wheel, an axle, and a shaft cone, further scaffolding the experience. It's still open-ended, but it guides students so they aren't just jumping into following building instructions.
Following build instructions is difficult due to spatial reasoning challenges. Students struggle with the orientation of pieces and holding them in the same manner as shown in the instructions. This is not due to a lack of ability but a lack of experience. Holding pieces correctly and placing connectors in the right spots requires spatial reasoning skills, which are difficult for students who haven't practiced them. Starting with free builds is an easier way to develop these skills, allowing students to scaffold up from simple to more complex tasks. As you can see, now I have two wheels attached.
Thank you for your attention and support in helping us bridge these educational gaps. Your involvement is crucial in fostering a rich learning environment for all students.
We appreciate your commitment to education and look forward to seeing the positive impact of these activities on our students' learning experiences.
And I have all these different activities, and this is a nice kind of ramp up and a nice easy way to get started for the students to actually do the building before you build a BaseBot, before you build a Clawbot, and follow those instructions to be able to do that.
Now let me show you where these things are in our curriculum. So I'm at education.vex.com, okay? I selected IQ. And you can see down here I have these activities, and I'll just go and I'll filter for engineering right here, okay? Let me find it down here. Signs right here. This is the very first one that I showed you, okay? As you can see here, this is going to cover pins, standups, and connectors. This is a very nice introduction for the students to be able to do these particular activities with them. Okay, real nice way again, to be able to do that.
Now, if you want a little bit more of a scaffolded experience, you don't want to try to put these things together kind of on your own, okay? If I go back to the IQ STEM Labs, and I go to our STEM Labs, and I'm going to filter again by engineering, okay? I have this Space Adventure activity series, okay? Now, if you're not familiar with our activity series, an activity series, you can basically think of if you took a lot of these activities, the individual Google Docs, and kind of put them all together in a sequence. You can see here we actually added the teacher notes for them right here.
So you can see here, this is going to be, you know, five parts, the Moon Base Setup, okay? You can see this is to construct a simple base to practice building a stable structure with beams, plates, connectors, and pins. Then we're going to get a Rover Ride, so now we're going to get into chassis with beams and connectors and axles and wheels. Then the Hilltop Hall. Now we're going to do an incline plane, okay? So now we're going to do a simple machine with beams, connectors, and plates as you see right here. Now we're going to add a pulley to it, okay? So now we're going to do a pulley system, okay? And now we're going to add a motor, okay, to our chassis. So the drivetrain that we did here, okay? So now again, this is a very scaffolded build experience that we have and you can see all of that right here.
So now here are the actual activities that you would give your students right here. So now we're introducing a drive train, an actual chassis here. Very nice introduction to the system as you can see here. Now, something that you can do at the very beginning of either of these things, if you want to do the individual activities, okay? Or if you want to do that particular STEM Lab there again, we have these different scavenger hunts. This is the advanced scavenger hunt here, but we have these different scavenger hunts.
What this does is this just kind of gets you connected to the actual kit itself. This utilizes our interactive parts poster, which is one of my favorite things about the kits here. This is a really nice feature that we have. So you can see obviously the parts poster that I have behind me right here, but this obviously isn't interactive, right? But this lists everything. We have this online for you, and you can select each of the parts to learn more about it. You can use either the physical parts poster or the interactive parts poster to actually go through and answer the questions we have on there. So I can select a shaft here, I can learn more about it. That's all great stuff.
But this scavenger hunt, again, is a really nice activity, okay, that you can go through and you can do with the students as an introduction to the kit. So again, if you have novices, students that have never built before, you can get started with activities like this. We have a more themed and scaffolded set of activities with their activity series right there.
You can also get started with the scavenger hunt, but this is a really nice way to kind of bridge that gap, right? To close that gap between your students that have been building VEX, are building things, using their hands for a long time, have those spatial reasoning skills developed, and those kids that do not. This essentially closes that gap.
As you know, our job as educators is not to create an artificial level for our students. Instead, it is to meet the students at their instruction levels. If you have students that have been doing this stuff for a long time, they'll make a much more complex sign than this, right? They'll have fun with it, they'll make it larger, they'll make it bigger. We give you some cues inside of the actual activity to help with that. They'll differentiate on their own because they enjoy doing it. So they'll make a much larger sign and you can help them do that.
But again, those kids that are just getting started, they can build something like this and then they can see what their peers are doing, right? They can see what their peers are doing and they can try to emulate what they're actually doing. We also know from research that the best formative assessment check is students helping other students, right? If the students can see what their peers are doing and learn from them, and if you've developed a classroom culture that fosters that, that is what really is going to help close that gap.
That's very important from an inclusivity perspective because at VEX, we're very big believers in this idea of STEM for all. I'm sure that you are in your classroom also. This is why oftentimes, for example, girls do not and they drop out of STEM because if those girls are the ones that don't have the experience building, maybe they weren't given those activities when they were younger or they can take something apart and put it back together. As a result of that, when it comes time for them to do this in their middle school classroom, they get grouped with some other students that do have experience.
What ends up happening? They say, "Oh, let me do it, I got it, let me do it. Let me do it. You don't know what you're doing. Give me the pieces. I'll follow the build instructions. I know what I'm doing." What does that tell that student then? What does that tell that young lady? That she's not welcome. This is something that she can't do. This is something that she's not good at and she shouldn't do it as a result. That's the phenomenon that we are trying to eliminate. That's what we don't want to have happen.
That again, is happening because you have some students bringing in all this background knowledge of building with things and using their hands and some students do not. We can help close that gap by doing activities like this, doing the activity series that I shared with you. This puts all of your students at the same plane. This helps to level the field for all students. That's a really big factor for inclusivity in your classroom. That's a really big factor of achieving what we're all trying to achieve, which again, is STEM for all.
So that's a really nice way to be able to do that and to really be able to help with that. Now, after you get done doing this, you've gone through these different activities, you've gone through activity series, now you want to actually build a robot, we do have some more things that can help you with that.
Let me go back to my computer. Let me close some of these tabs. If you followed any of my live sessions or webinars, you know that by the end of these things I got 9 million tabs open. So I'm going to go ahead and close some of these now and I'm going to go back to our STEM Labs here, okay?
And let me go, and I'm going to go, let's just go to the Tug of War STEM Lab here. If you're unfamiliar with our STEM Lab, this is our VEX IQ 2nd Gen STEM Lab, which is a Tug of War STEM Lab. This is an engineering STEM Lab, okay? In all of our STEM Labs, we have a teacher's portal right here. These are all designed to help you get started. You can think of this as your online teacher's manual, essentially.
I'm going to scroll down here and highlight one particular part. This is building your first robot, okay? In addition to the build instructions that we have, this is Matt, our in-house engineer. He's going to go through and build a VEX IQ 2nd Gen robot. Now, there is absolutely no reason why, even though this is a teacher's portal, you can't show this to your class. It's a 40-minute video. So in one class period, or maybe two if you pause a lot through it, you can have your students follow along as Matt builds this first BaseBot. Or you yourself, if you're like me and don't have a lot of background knowledge in engineering, can follow along with Matt.
Matt does a great job in this video of highlighting certain parts. I'll go back to the video here. He highlights certain parts where you may have difficulties, where some things might be more difficult than others. He does a great job, and you can see he's doing one right now. He explains what that part is actually used for, like the cap on the axle, going through and doing all this for you. This is a really nice way to learn the ins and outs of building. It's a very nice way to scaffold the experience. You can see he's using the ruler, which is a great tool for you to use as you're building. It's a great way to identify some of the different parts. He's going to walk through all these particular tips and tricks with you to make the experience of building the robot much easier and better for you. There's lots of scaffolding if you're just getting started with VEX and building.
Now, to go on to our second bullet, if you have more experienced students in your classrooms, these STEM Labs are a great way to facilitate that process and take your students to the next level when it comes to building. Let me go back to my computer here. Let me go back to the actual STEM Labs here, okay? You can see here, now we're going to lesson two, which is Pulling Objects. With this one and all of our IQ competition STEM Labs, there's this learn section, and this is where we're going to talk about the concepts in the Labs. This is going to be all about forces, which is obviously very important for engineering.
In the other lessons, in lesson three, we're going to learn about a gear train. Lesson four, we're going to learn about mass. These are all more sophisticated concepts that I can teach my students when it comes time for them to learn a STEM Lab. With our VEX IQ 2nd Gen STEM Labs, we cover mass, gear trains, manipulators, and how to do different claws and arms in our up and over STEM Lab. There are a lot of different engineering concepts that we cover in that STEM Lab, which would be very beneficial if you have those students looking to take the next step and really take their building to the next level with VEX.
We will talk about this more when we get to the how to teach engineering part, where you can really accelerate that. But I want to point out those resources are in there.
Thank you for your attention, and I hope you find these resources helpful in your teaching journey.
Now, some of the common teaching issues that you're going to run into, whether you have novices or more experienced students, come to light when it's time to teach. Number one is group work, okay? I talk about this in my book, and I discuss it a lot when I go out and talk to folks. I was terrible at group work when I taught. What I realized was the reason why I did not do group work well. Let me define what I mean by terrible: I would put three students in a group, one student would do everything, another student was completely tuned out, and the third student was causing problems in my classroom. That is really how 75 to 80% of my group work went when I was teaching.
I really struggled with this because I believed in students having the ability to work together and collaborate, but they just didn't do it well. What I realized is that I was not putting them in a position to be successful. What do I mean by that? Well, we know if you've ever been in a meeting, whether it's a faculty meeting at school or whatever you're doing, adults do not do a very good job of self-organizing. If you ask adults to just go in a group and solve a problem, they don't do a good job of that. So why are we expecting 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old students to self-organize well?
What do I mean by self-organize? You put those students in a group of three or four and then say, "Okay, I want you to build this VEX IQ, second gen Clawbot." How do they actually do that? How do they organize themselves to build this robot? That's what I mean by self-organization. Well, we have tried to eliminate that problem for you. Let me go back to my computer. This is in the teacher notes, but this is a fantastic article in our VEX library, and it's all about supporting student collaboration, okay?
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Again, this is a fantastic article, and you can see here if you're building the BaseBot, we have roles for you. So you have student one, they do steps one to eight, student two, they do steps nine through 14, and student three, they do steps 15 through 20. We did not just pick those steps arbitrarily. Instead, we divided it up so when those students get done with those three parts, they can then put them together and build the BaseBot successfully. Now, those students do not have to self-organize. I know I'm doing steps one through eight. I know my one partner's doing steps nine through 14. I know the other partner's doing steps 15 through 20. We all know what everyone is doing. We do not have to self-organize.
As a teacher, I can now facilitate that process because I know what every student is supposed to be doing in their group, and I don't have to try to guess as to what they're doing because I don't know what they're doing. Because again, they're self-organizing. This is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful resource that you can utilize. You can see we have it for the BaseBot, the Clawbot, and the Simple Clawbot. Fantastic ways to be able to do that.
This goes beyond just engineering. You can see this applies to coding and the actual competitions that we have themselves. But this section right here is, again, a fantastic resource that you can utilize so that your students do not have to self-organize.
Now, what is another problem that you have? Some students are going to get done before other students. I talked about this at the beginning. We also have an article that helps with that. You can see here, engaging students who get done quickly, right? Now, what this article does a great job of talking about is you cannot wait until those students get done quickly to help solve this problem.
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Thank you for taking the time to explore these resources. I hope they prove helpful in your teaching journey. Remember, effective collaboration and engagement are key to successful learning experiences.
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Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further assistance. Happy teaching!
Again, you have to create the culture of collaboration within your classroom where there is an expectation of what your students are expected to do when they get done quickly, okay? When it happens, you cannot do something then; this is something that you have to take time with at the beginning to help with the process.
Now, I know as teachers, you know, a question you get all the time is there's always concerns about time. I'm trying to cover all this, you know, so on and so forth. You're either going to spend the time at the beginning or you're going to spend the time during the actual lesson itself because you're going to be troubleshooting, right? So spend the time at the beginning, foreground your expectations for the students, create that culture like I'm talking about, and have the students help one another when it comes time for them to do that when they get done quickly.
And again, this article is a great way to actually go through and it shows you all different types of cues and helps and things they can do. They can also do other activities, right? All different types of things that students do. This is another wonderful resource that you can utilize in your classroom to really help students as they get done quickly, or if they get done before the other students get done with it.
Now, one other thing I do want to show you talking about it, you know, to help students, I forgot to mention this earlier, to help students get done, I'm sorry, to help students kind of take what they're doing to the next level. We have this great site, it's called videos.vex.com. I've had the pleasure for the last couple years of going through myself and base spot, the co-founder of VEX, interviewing all these students, talking about their robot builds, talking about what they're doing in their engineering notebooks, as you see right here, okay? These are just fantastic resources that you can utilize for your students.
So again, they can actually see these different examples and then actually try to emulate them in your classroom and follow along what it is that they are doing in the classroom and see these examples from other students. This is what more advanced VEX teams do for the VEX competition, to be honest with you. They go through and they see what is required from that year's game. They analyze, you know, do I need a certain manipulator? Okay, I'm going to have to grab something, I'm going to have to carry something, may have to shoot into a goal, I have to grab an odd-sized object, whatever it is. And they go and they research previous years' games to see what those robots did. If they had to carry an odd-sized object, or if they had to intake that particular object, or if they had to carry it, or if the robot had to hang at the end of the competition, whatever it is, they go and they investigate successful robots from years past and they try to emulate that for their first round, for their first iteration.
Instead of you having to do all that investigation on your own, we created videos.vex.com as a resource. So you can actually go and look at these robots, listen to the students and see what it is that they are doing, okay? So we have all the different sections on it. Like I talked about, notebooking, engineering, reveals, right? So as people reveal their particular robots here, there's a lot of different things on there. But again, wonderful resource for you to be able to utilize effectively for those students to really take what they are doing to the next level with their building and their engineering in their classrooms, okay?
So let me review where we're at so far and then we'll get into the actual teaching part of this. Number one, engineering for novices. What's the important thing there? You want to close the gap, right?
You want to make sure that those students that do not have a lot of experience with building, you level the playing field between them and the rest of your students. We have the activities and the activities series to scaffold that process. Do not just throw them into the build instructions. Instead, have them go through and do those free builds. Introduce them to the pins, to the standoffs, to the beams, all those different concepts, slowly introducing them to that. Then you can go and have them follow the build instructions or they could follow the video that we have there in our teachers portal.
What do you do with more experienced students? Go to our STEM Labs, right? Our STEM Labs are a wonderful resource for you to start with the concepts and more sophisticated concepts around engineering, and then really allow your students to take it to the next level and use the different examples that we have on engineering.vex.com. And of course, if you can't find a particular example on there, that's how you can use the community. If you're stuck on a particular concept or if your students are stuck on a particular concept, ask for ideas in the community to see what other teachers are doing. Or if we have some expertise that we can share with you, we are more than happy to provide you with some prompts and some ideas and do some open-ended exploration with you. That's what our professional learning community is for, to help guide you so that you can then guide your students as they're doing these different engineering challenges within our STEM Labs.
Now, that only works, however, if you get this third part right, which is the teaching part, right? How do you put your students in a position to be successful? Whether you are just starting or you have the more experienced students that you want to take to the next level. And if you take nothing else from this video or this live session we're doing right now, please take this away. The number one thing that you have to do as a classroom teacher and you're teaching engineering is established amongst your classroom and amongst your students a STEM identity, okay? You have to establish the STEM identity.
What do I mean by that? When I say a STEM identity? If you have a STEM identity, that means you are not afraid to take risks. You do not view failure as failure. Instead, you view it as feedback in order to be able to get better. That is so very important. You have to create a culture in your classroom where your students are not afraid to take risks. How do you do that? You have to incentivize risk and actually make taking risks and failing the goal of the lesson or the activity. You can't just talk about it. You can't just pat little John or Susie on the back and say, "Oh, you tried well. Nice job, don't get discouraged." You have to make the actual focal point of the lesson, failure. Who can fail fast, learn, incorporate what they learned into their robot, and then repeat. That has to be the goal of your lesson you're trying to do, to go through and make that feedback loop as tight as possible and not, again, just to talk about failure as feedback and to encourage students when they do fail, but again, foreground and say, "You are going to fail and that's great. That's what I want you to do. Because the only way that you can learn successfully is if you fail. That's what I want you to be able to do."
Secondly, they've got to be comfortable with iteration. You've gotta recognize it's going to take a lot of different ways to be able to do this, and it's going to take a lot of different attempts to be able to do this. And my first attempt is not going to be right. You've gotta drill that into your students. Your first attempt is never right, and as a matter of fact, there is never a correct answer. The great thing about these VEX IQ, 2nd Gen competition, STEM Labs, is you are never done. You can always get better.
Thank you for your attention and dedication to fostering a growth mindset in your students. We hope these insights help you create a dynamic and supportive learning environment.
If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. We are here to support you in your teaching journey.
You can always improve the design of your robot. You can always improve your coding, and you can always improve your strategy. So you've got to become comfortable with iteration to be successful and to have a good STEM identity.
The third thing, and this is really incumbent upon you, the teacher, and not so much the students, is you have to create a culture where assessment is shared. Assessment is student-centered, not teacher-centered, because all that stuff I just talked about with risk-taking and being comfortable with iteration, as soon as you stamp a grade on it, it goes out the window. Forget it, it is done. If the goal of the lesson is for a student to get a certain grade on a rubric, or if the goal of the lesson for the student is to get a particular letter grade, they are never going to accept failure and they are never going to accept iteration because their goal is to try to get the highest grade possible because that is the incentive structure that we've created in our classroom. So you can't do that. You've got to get assessment right. You've got to make it so learning is the goal and not the grade. You have to shift the focus from an output, which is a grade, to an outcome, which is learning.
That's the third part about creating a STEM identity: the emphasis is on learning and not a particular output. You're instead focused on outcome. So those three things, you've got to incentivize failure, you have to be comfortable with iteration, and you have to focus on learning and not a letter grade. If you can do those three things in your classroom, then you will be successfully teaching engineering.
How do you organize that? How do you do that effectively? That's the engineering design process. This is something that we talk a lot about in our curriculum. This engineering design process is the process that you want to be able to engage your students with, and being involved in that process will facilitate that STEM identity that I talked about with you.
Now, I spent about 45 minutes with a video and a teacher portal for all of our VEX IQ 2nd Gen STEM Labs, talking about this engineering design process. But, so I'm not going to go through and talk about this again with you, but I want to point this out to you. This is the perfect organizer for that STEM identity that I talked about.
The one thing I want to mention to you also is this first step. This is where a lot of teachers and students mess up the engineering design process because they speed through that first step. Take your time on that first step. Really take your time thinking about the problem that you're trying to solve. Try to approach the problem from different perspectives. Make sure that you understand not just the problem, but also what you're actually trying to achieve. Really spend some time there at that first particular step.
One of the biggest things that I hear from both VEX IQ and VRC mentors all the time when I travel to competitions is that my students want to immediately start building a robot and they don't know the rules of the game. Now, I'm sorry, but that's your fault as a mentor because you are not creating the right environment where you value that first step in the engineering design process, where you actually have conversations with your students about what it is you're trying to do, how you're going to do it, and different perspectives upon it. You've really got to spend some time there.
In addition to that, research tells us that the process we talked about right there, really examining a problem from as many different angles as possible, is what fosters creativity. And of course, we're all aware that people are worried about AI replacing this job or that job.
Thank you for your attention and dedication to fostering a strong STEM identity in your students. Your efforts in creating a supportive and innovative learning environment are truly appreciated.
It's not going to replace those students of ours that are extremely creative. And you want to foster creativity in your classroom. This is how you do it right here: you spend time at the beginning really thinking about the problem that you're trying to solve, and you don't immediately jump into solving the problem, okay? That's what you want to spend some time doing. That's a key part of the engineering design process.
And then, of course, you build your first iteration, you go through it, you try to think about it, and then you optimize in step three. Now, the great thing about this is in those competition STEM Labs, you want the students to learn from each other. So if we're playing Tug of War, the STEM Lab I showed you, and I lose, well, what was the other robot doing? What was different with it? How did it work?
And then if you can create that classroom culture where the students are willing to talk to one another, right, about it, "Hey, we tried this with our robot and it was successful, did a really nice job." That is a really great way to foster that formative assessment, which the students, the other students, are doing the formative assessment check and not you, the teacher. That also falls into what I was talking about a second ago about making assessment student-centered as opposed to teacher-centered. That's another great example of it. That all falls into the engineering design process right here.
Now, I know if you're unfamiliar with our STEM Labs and you haven't read about it in our certification course about student-centered instructions and seeing our teacher notes and talked about the brief conversations and all that, this might be a lot for you. Ask a question in the community. I would love to engage in a conversation with you about how to really do this engineering design process. I talk about it in my book; I have a chapter devoted to it. So this is something I really enjoy talking about. So don't be afraid to ask those questions to the community, and we can have a great conversation about fostering the STEM identity amongst our students so we can teach engineering effectively amongst our students.
Okay, the last couple of minutes that we have here in our live session is that I want to talk about common teaching issues. I already talked about storage, already talked about students that get done early. The other big thing that we have is I don't have enough robots, right? This is another big issue that we have: I don't have enough robots. I'm teaching multiple classes, right? I'm teaching Robotics, period one, period three, period five, whatever it is, and I don't have enough sets, classroom bundles for all those particular classes. So what do I do?
Okay, a couple of different things you can do with that. Number one is you can utilize VEX GO, right? VEX GO is a plastic-based robotic system, just like VEX IQ, it's not as much plastic. The motors and the sensors are not as powerful as VEX IQ, but you can still do a lot of great engineering with VEX GO at a lower price point than VEX IQ. So instead of supplementing those classrooms with more IQ bundles, if you don't have the budget to do that, then use VEX GO. Buy VEX GO; this is a great way to supplement what your students are doing, and there's a lot of different building activities you can do.
And what we talked about when I was talking about engineering for the novices, beams and standoffs and pins, corner connectors, learning a chassis, attaching a wheel, attaching an axle. You'll learn all of that with VEX GO. It's the exact same process that you would have with this here. This is a great way to supplement what you are doing in your classroom at a lower price point than VEX IQ. So that's methodology number one. Methodology number two is you can supplement them with VEXcode VR.
Thank you for joining this session. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. We appreciate your dedication to fostering creativity and innovation in your classroom.
So basically, you can have your Robotics kit in period one, and then for periods three and five, have them do a coding challenge with VEXcode VR. Then do that for like two or three weeks. Then take those Robotics kits, let period three do the engineering activity, period one is now doing VEXcode VR, and now period five is doing another coding challenge. Then you bring the kit back up to period five. This is a way that you can get more out of your actual kits by using VEXcode VR to extend them in that fashion.
That example I just gave you, we have in a pacing guide which I'm going to show you right now, but we have another example in that pacing guide. So let me go back to my computer view and let me go to the Teach IQ page, which is right here. So this is teachiq.vex.com. Okay, let me go back to the top of the page so you can see the URL teachiq.vex.com. We have a welcome here. This video that Elena does walks you through everything that we're talking about right here. Let me go down to the scope and sequences right here.
We have engineering focus, coding focus, competition focus, multiple classes with one VEX IQ bundle. What's great about this, as you can see here, are these activities, like the Wheel It activity right here. You can do this activity after the BaseBot is built or the Sign activity. You can do this activity after the BaseBot is built. So if you've ever noticed, if you build a BaseBot, you're not using all the plastic in your kit, okay? You're not using everything in the kit when you build a BaseBot or a ClawBot for that matter. So what we've done is we've designed activities that you can utilize with the extra plastic that you have in your kit.
So you can have period one build the BaseBot. As the BaseBots are built, you can either keep them up, do some coding with it, or whatever, and then have the rest of the students do the activities that we have on there. It's all itemized for you there on that scope and sequence. Again, a great way that you can get more out of the actual kit that you have.
But hey, if you have other challenges that I haven't talked about here, or if you have different methods to solve those particular challenges, ask the question in the community. We'll be more than happy to get back to you and chat with you and talk with you about what those challenges are. Our collective heads here at VEX IQ and also with teachers all over the world, we will be able to solve those particular issues for you.
Are there any questions in the chat? No questions in the chat. So either you're saving your questions for your community, or I've answered all your questions here during the live session. Either way, that's great.
I do want to mention to you our next live session. Let me show that to you right now at pd.vex.com. Let me show you the live session. Well, I can't show you the live session because I'm not logged into it. But our next live session, I'll just tell you right now, is going to be on November 15th. We're going to be talking about data logging that will be in PD+ here, so stay tuned for that. You'll actually be able to see it, but that'll be up on there. I'll put a post about that in our community so you can be aware of that. You can go ahead and get that date marked on your calendar and be able to go from there.
Our next live session, again, is going to be on November 15th, and we're going to be talking about data logging, which is a really cool concept that I can't wait to share with you that you can actually do with your VEX platform. We're going to do a data logging session on both V5 and also VEX IQ, so stay tuned for that.
Thank you for your attendance in the live session here today.
I look forward to continuing this conversation and our professional learning community in VEX Professional Development Plus. Thank you very much for being a member of VEX Professional Development Plus.
Don't forget to visit conference.vex.com. We just launched that page a few weeks ago. We have information there about our VEX Educators Conference at VEX Worlds. You can submit an application to be a speaker at the VEX Educators Conference. That's all at conference.vex.com. We would love to see your application to come and speak at the VEX Educators Conference.
If you don't want to speak, nevertheless, we would love to see you at the VEX Educators Conference. Go to conference.vex.com to see all the information there.
And again, my name is Jason McKenna. Thank you so much for being a member of VEX PD+. I will speak with you soon.
Talk again soon from the VEX Classroom.
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Hi, welcome to the VEX Classroom. My name is Jason McKenna. It's a pleasure to be with you here today where today's topic for our Live Session, you can see here we're going to be talking about Engineering with VEX IQ. Now, this is something, to be honest with you, I struggled a lot with when I was an educator. As a teacher in the classroom, I did a lot better with the coding aspect of STEM than I did with engineering. So this is something that's always been kind of near and dear to my heart, which is, how do you prepare teachers in classrooms to help facilitate students when they want to be able to build something and they want to be able to build creations on their own and collaborate with their friends and be able to do all of that fun stuff that we really love in a STEM classroom?
So what I want to take you through today in our live session is number one, engineering for novices. So if you've got a group of students, maybe like, you know, fourth, fifth, or sixth grade students around that age range that have never built anything before with VEX IQ, how do you scaffold that experience for them? And of course, what if you have more experienced students? What if you have students that have been building for years, engineering for years, and you kind of want to take them to the next level? What can you do to facilitate that process? And then thirdly, how do you actually teach engineering? And how do you actually teach the students the skills they need in order to be able to do engineering and building with your VEX IQ system effectively? We're going to talk about all three of those things during the live session today.
If you have any questions during our live session, feel free to throw them in the chat. We'll go through and answer. I'll stop and pause a few times and answer the questions as they come up. And I'll leave some time at the end of the live session to answer whatever questions that you may have. Of course, this is being recorded, so if you have to leave early or whatever, don't worry about it. This will be posted in VEX Professional Development Plus. You always have the opportunity to re-watch this video. Or if you have to leave early, watch another part of it. Or if you feel like you know your friend who's also a member, your co-teacher that's a member of VEX PD+ would really get a lot out of this video, you can obviously let them know about it.
All of these great conversations that we're having around coding and around STEM and around engineering with VEX IQ, you can have these same discussions in our professional learning community. So if you have a question, you don't want to ask it now, you want to wait to ask it in a professional learning community, you can do that. If you have a comment, you can certainly do that. Ask those questions in the professional learning community.
Now, one thing I will say, from the very top and all of my travels, you know, in my capacity with VEX all over the world, one of the main questions I always get about building and engineering with VEX IQ or EXP or V5 or even VEX GO, is what do I do about classroom storage? How do I handle classroom storage? What do I do about, you know, parts that are missing? Do I make a parts inventory list? What do I do about that? And our professional learning community is the perfect place to ask that question because there is no one answer for it. If there was one answer, believe me, we'd have it in our VEX library. We'd have a STEM Lab that talked about it. We'd have all this information that talked about. But every classroom is different, whether it's from the size of the classroom, the amount of kits that you have, the amount of students you have in your classroom, the amount of kids you have sharing your kits. Every classroom dynamic is different, every school is different.
So it is impossible for me to say this is the one way or the one methodology that you should be storing or keeping track of all of your VEX IQ pieces. But we have a lot of great suggestions and great examples in our professional learning community. So if you've joined this live session, or if you're watching a recording and you're like, how do I store and how do I keep track of all these VEX IQ pieces? Ask that question in our professional learning community. Matt, our in-house engineer here in our office, will help answer that question. There are other teachers that will chime in and answer with that.
Some teachers keep everything in their kits. I spent some time in December of last year down at Dallas ISD. My man, Omar Cortez, has a great way that he keeps track of all of his kits in the back of his classroom. He has storage to be able to do that. Other people take all the pieces out so all their connectors are in one bin, all of their beams are in another bin, whatever it is. There are different ways to do it, again, based upon whatever your classroom dynamics are. So ask that question in the community and we'll get you the help that you need.
Okay, engineering for novices. Now about, oh gosh, going about eight years ago now, I had one of the very first VEX IQ robots in my classroom. I actually, you know, at the time I was one of the beta testers for VEX IQ Gen 1 when it first came out. So when it did, the first thing I had my students do was build this Clawbott. Now, it wasn't this Clawbott, 'cause this is a Gen 2 Clawbot, but they built the first generation VEX IQ Clawbot, because it really wasn't another alternative. That was what you did. You kind of built the Clawbot and you got started with it.
Some students, some groups of students, it took them about a day or two to build the Clawbot. I had other students, it took them a week and a half to build a Clawbot. That, of course, presented a lot of challenges for me as a teacher. What do I do with those other kids that take longer? What do I do with the kids that, you know, don't take quite as long? How do I scaffold that experience for the students? But I'm going to get into that in a minute. We have some resources to help with that.
But before that, I want to talk about the why. Why do you have some students that can build this Clawbot or another contraption with VEX quickly, easily, no problem at all, but you have other students that struggle? Why is that? What is going on there? And the misconception that a lot of people have amongst both adults and students is that you have some students, they're just naturally good at engineering. They're just naturally good at putting things together. They're good with their hands or whatever that particular vernacular is. And you have other students that are not.
But of course, we know from educational research, there's no such thing as an engineering brain. There's no such thing as a math brain. There's no such thing as a humanities brain for that matter. The biggest predictor for the success or lack of success of your students, when it comes time for them to do something like build a robot, follow build instructions to build a robot like this, is the amount of background knowledge that they bring to that classroom. This exists for any domain, not just engineering, right? The amount of background knowledge that you bring into a classroom determines your success or lack of success in the classroom. It's the number one predictor.
That's why here in the U.S. we spend our tax dollars on things like Sesame Street, Public Broadcasting. So students that maybe aren't in a situation at home where they're taught sight words or they're taught numbers, they can get those things from public television, learn their letters and sounds and numbers and all of that.
Thank you for joining us today and for being part of our community. We appreciate your dedication to learning and teaching. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out.
We look forward to seeing you in our next session. Take care and happy building!
So when they come into kindergarten, there's not this big huge gap between them and the students that have parents who might read to them every single day. In those households, words and letters are rich and ever-present. We aim to close that gap because we know how important background knowledge is. If you have students who have never built something following instructions, never connected pins and beams together, they are going to struggle when it comes to following build instructions to create something like the VEX IQ Clawbot. Students who are encouraged at home to take things apart and put them back together are naturally going to excel at this.
What we've designed in our curriculum are various activities to scaffold the process. I have some examples here to show you. As an educator, I initially thought it was easier to get started by following build instructions, but I was wrong. Following the build instructions is actually more difficult for students compared to giving them an activity like building a sign or a flag. This simple activity introduces standoffs, connectors, pins, and beams to the students. It's a free build they can do on their own, which helps them get used to connecting things together, finding pieces, and assembling them, ensuring success in the classroom.
From this simple activity, we can progress to something like "Build A House," where students are introduced to corner connectors. They learn to connect things at ninety-degree angles, moving from basic assembly to more complex structures. As you can see, the pieces inside are doing the corner connections, scaffolding the experience for students. Next, they might build a wheelbarrow, adding a wheel, an axle, and a shaft cone, further scaffolding the experience. It's still open-ended, but it guides students so they aren't just jumping into following building instructions.
Following build instructions is difficult due to spatial reasoning challenges. Students struggle with the orientation of pieces and holding them in the same manner as shown in the instructions. This is not due to a lack of ability but a lack of experience. Holding pieces correctly and placing connectors in the right spots requires spatial reasoning skills, which are difficult for students who haven't practiced them. Starting with free builds is an easier way to develop these skills, allowing students to scaffold up from simple to more complex tasks. As you can see, now I have two wheels attached.
Thank you for your attention and support in helping us bridge these educational gaps. Your involvement is crucial in fostering a rich learning environment for all students.
We appreciate your commitment to education and look forward to seeing the positive impact of these activities on our students' learning experiences.
And I have all these different activities, and this is a nice kind of ramp up and a nice easy way to get started for the students to actually do the building before you build a BaseBot, before you build a Clawbot, and follow those instructions to be able to do that.
Now let me show you where these things are in our curriculum. So I'm at education.vex.com, okay? I selected IQ. And you can see down here I have these activities, and I'll just go and I'll filter for engineering right here, okay? Let me find it down here. Signs right here. This is the very first one that I showed you, okay? As you can see here, this is going to cover pins, standups, and connectors. This is a very nice introduction for the students to be able to do these particular activities with them. Okay, real nice way again, to be able to do that.
Now, if you want a little bit more of a scaffolded experience, you don't want to try to put these things together kind of on your own, okay? If I go back to the IQ STEM Labs, and I go to our STEM Labs, and I'm going to filter again by engineering, okay? I have this Space Adventure activity series, okay? Now, if you're not familiar with our activity series, an activity series, you can basically think of if you took a lot of these activities, the individual Google Docs, and kind of put them all together in a sequence. You can see here we actually added the teacher notes for them right here.
So you can see here, this is going to be, you know, five parts, the Moon Base Setup, okay? You can see this is to construct a simple base to practice building a stable structure with beams, plates, connectors, and pins. Then we're going to get a Rover Ride, so now we're going to get into chassis with beams and connectors and axles and wheels. Then the Hilltop Hall. Now we're going to do an incline plane, okay? So now we're going to do a simple machine with beams, connectors, and plates as you see right here. Now we're going to add a pulley to it, okay? So now we're going to do a pulley system, okay? And now we're going to add a motor, okay, to our chassis. So the drivetrain that we did here, okay? So now again, this is a very scaffolded build experience that we have and you can see all of that right here.
So now here are the actual activities that you would give your students right here. So now we're introducing a drive train, an actual chassis here. Very nice introduction to the system as you can see here. Now, something that you can do at the very beginning of either of these things, if you want to do the individual activities, okay? Or if you want to do that particular STEM Lab there again, we have these different scavenger hunts. This is the advanced scavenger hunt here, but we have these different scavenger hunts.
What this does is this just kind of gets you connected to the actual kit itself. This utilizes our interactive parts poster, which is one of my favorite things about the kits here. This is a really nice feature that we have. So you can see obviously the parts poster that I have behind me right here, but this obviously isn't interactive, right? But this lists everything. We have this online for you, and you can select each of the parts to learn more about it. You can use either the physical parts poster or the interactive parts poster to actually go through and answer the questions we have on there. So I can select a shaft here, I can learn more about it. That's all great stuff.
But this scavenger hunt, again, is a really nice activity, okay, that you can go through and you can do with the students as an introduction to the kit. So again, if you have novices, students that have never built before, you can get started with activities like this. We have a more themed and scaffolded set of activities with their activity series right there.
You can also get started with the scavenger hunt, but this is a really nice way to kind of bridge that gap, right? To close that gap between your students that have been building VEX, are building things, using their hands for a long time, have those spatial reasoning skills developed, and those kids that do not. This essentially closes that gap.
As you know, our job as educators is not to create an artificial level for our students. Instead, it is to meet the students at their instruction levels. If you have students that have been doing this stuff for a long time, they'll make a much more complex sign than this, right? They'll have fun with it, they'll make it larger, they'll make it bigger. We give you some cues inside of the actual activity to help with that. They'll differentiate on their own because they enjoy doing it. So they'll make a much larger sign and you can help them do that.
But again, those kids that are just getting started, they can build something like this and then they can see what their peers are doing, right? They can see what their peers are doing and they can try to emulate what they're actually doing. We also know from research that the best formative assessment check is students helping other students, right? If the students can see what their peers are doing and learn from them, and if you've developed a classroom culture that fosters that, that is what really is going to help close that gap.
That's very important from an inclusivity perspective because at VEX, we're very big believers in this idea of STEM for all. I'm sure that you are in your classroom also. This is why oftentimes, for example, girls do not and they drop out of STEM because if those girls are the ones that don't have the experience building, maybe they weren't given those activities when they were younger or they can take something apart and put it back together. As a result of that, when it comes time for them to do this in their middle school classroom, they get grouped with some other students that do have experience.
What ends up happening? They say, "Oh, let me do it, I got it, let me do it. Let me do it. You don't know what you're doing. Give me the pieces. I'll follow the build instructions. I know what I'm doing." What does that tell that student then? What does that tell that young lady? That she's not welcome. This is something that she can't do. This is something that she's not good at and she shouldn't do it as a result. That's the phenomenon that we are trying to eliminate. That's what we don't want to have happen.
That again, is happening because you have some students bringing in all this background knowledge of building with things and using their hands and some students do not. We can help close that gap by doing activities like this, doing the activity series that I shared with you. This puts all of your students at the same plane. This helps to level the field for all students. That's a really big factor for inclusivity in your classroom. That's a really big factor of achieving what we're all trying to achieve, which again, is STEM for all.
So that's a really nice way to be able to do that and to really be able to help with that. Now, after you get done doing this, you've gone through these different activities, you've gone through activity series, now you want to actually build a robot, we do have some more things that can help you with that.
Let me go back to my computer. Let me close some of these tabs. If you followed any of my live sessions or webinars, you know that by the end of these things I got 9 million tabs open. So I'm going to go ahead and close some of these now and I'm going to go back to our STEM Labs here, okay?
And let me go, and I'm going to go, let's just go to the Tug of War STEM Lab here. If you're unfamiliar with our STEM Lab, this is our VEX IQ 2nd Gen STEM Lab, which is a Tug of War STEM Lab. This is an engineering STEM Lab, okay? In all of our STEM Labs, we have a teacher's portal right here. These are all designed to help you get started. You can think of this as your online teacher's manual, essentially.
I'm going to scroll down here and highlight one particular part. This is building your first robot, okay? In addition to the build instructions that we have, this is Matt, our in-house engineer. He's going to go through and build a VEX IQ 2nd Gen robot. Now, there is absolutely no reason why, even though this is a teacher's portal, you can't show this to your class. It's a 40-minute video. So in one class period, or maybe two if you pause a lot through it, you can have your students follow along as Matt builds this first BaseBot. Or you yourself, if you're like me and don't have a lot of background knowledge in engineering, can follow along with Matt.
Matt does a great job in this video of highlighting certain parts. I'll go back to the video here. He highlights certain parts where you may have difficulties, where some things might be more difficult than others. He does a great job, and you can see he's doing one right now. He explains what that part is actually used for, like the cap on the axle, going through and doing all this for you. This is a really nice way to learn the ins and outs of building. It's a very nice way to scaffold the experience. You can see he's using the ruler, which is a great tool for you to use as you're building. It's a great way to identify some of the different parts. He's going to walk through all these particular tips and tricks with you to make the experience of building the robot much easier and better for you. There's lots of scaffolding if you're just getting started with VEX and building.
Now, to go on to our second bullet, if you have more experienced students in your classrooms, these STEM Labs are a great way to facilitate that process and take your students to the next level when it comes to building. Let me go back to my computer here. Let me go back to the actual STEM Labs here, okay? You can see here, now we're going to lesson two, which is Pulling Objects. With this one and all of our IQ competition STEM Labs, there's this learn section, and this is where we're going to talk about the concepts in the Labs. This is going to be all about forces, which is obviously very important for engineering.
In the other lessons, in lesson three, we're going to learn about a gear train. Lesson four, we're going to learn about mass. These are all more sophisticated concepts that I can teach my students when it comes time for them to learn a STEM Lab. With our VEX IQ 2nd Gen STEM Labs, we cover mass, gear trains, manipulators, and how to do different claws and arms in our up and over STEM Lab. There are a lot of different engineering concepts that we cover in that STEM Lab, which would be very beneficial if you have those students looking to take the next step and really take their building to the next level with VEX.
We will talk about this more when we get to the how to teach engineering part, where you can really accelerate that. But I want to point out those resources are in there.
Thank you for your attention, and I hope you find these resources helpful in your teaching journey.
Now, some of the common teaching issues that you're going to run into, whether you have novices or more experienced students, come to light when it's time to teach. Number one is group work, okay? I talk about this in my book, and I discuss it a lot when I go out and talk to folks. I was terrible at group work when I taught. What I realized was the reason why I did not do group work well. Let me define what I mean by terrible: I would put three students in a group, one student would do everything, another student was completely tuned out, and the third student was causing problems in my classroom. That is really how 75 to 80% of my group work went when I was teaching.
I really struggled with this because I believed in students having the ability to work together and collaborate, but they just didn't do it well. What I realized is that I was not putting them in a position to be successful. What do I mean by that? Well, we know if you've ever been in a meeting, whether it's a faculty meeting at school or whatever you're doing, adults do not do a very good job of self-organizing. If you ask adults to just go in a group and solve a problem, they don't do a good job of that. So why are we expecting 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old students to self-organize well?
What do I mean by self-organize? You put those students in a group of three or four and then say, "Okay, I want you to build this VEX IQ, second gen Clawbot." How do they actually do that? How do they organize themselves to build this robot? That's what I mean by self-organization. Well, we have tried to eliminate that problem for you. Let me go back to my computer. This is in the teacher notes, but this is a fantastic article in our VEX library, and it's all about supporting student collaboration, okay?
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Again, this is a fantastic article, and you can see here if you're building the BaseBot, we have roles for you. So you have student one, they do steps one to eight, student two, they do steps nine through 14, and student three, they do steps 15 through 20. We did not just pick those steps arbitrarily. Instead, we divided it up so when those students get done with those three parts, they can then put them together and build the BaseBot successfully. Now, those students do not have to self-organize. I know I'm doing steps one through eight. I know my one partner's doing steps nine through 14. I know the other partner's doing steps 15 through 20. We all know what everyone is doing. We do not have to self-organize.
As a teacher, I can now facilitate that process because I know what every student is supposed to be doing in their group, and I don't have to try to guess as to what they're doing because I don't know what they're doing. Because again, they're self-organizing. This is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful resource that you can utilize. You can see we have it for the BaseBot, the Clawbot, and the Simple Clawbot. Fantastic ways to be able to do that.
This goes beyond just engineering. You can see this applies to coding and the actual competitions that we have themselves. But this section right here is, again, a fantastic resource that you can utilize so that your students do not have to self-organize.
Now, what is another problem that you have? Some students are going to get done before other students. I talked about this at the beginning. We also have an article that helps with that. You can see here, engaging students who get done quickly, right? Now, what this article does a great job of talking about is you cannot wait until those students get done quickly to help solve this problem.
[Music Cue]
Thank you for taking the time to explore these resources. I hope they prove helpful in your teaching journey. Remember, effective collaboration and engagement are key to successful learning experiences.
[Final Message]
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further assistance. Happy teaching!
Again, you have to create the culture of collaboration within your classroom where there is an expectation of what your students are expected to do when they get done quickly, okay? When it happens, you cannot do something then; this is something that you have to take time with at the beginning to help with the process.
Now, I know as teachers, you know, a question you get all the time is there's always concerns about time. I'm trying to cover all this, you know, so on and so forth. You're either going to spend the time at the beginning or you're going to spend the time during the actual lesson itself because you're going to be troubleshooting, right? So spend the time at the beginning, foreground your expectations for the students, create that culture like I'm talking about, and have the students help one another when it comes time for them to do that when they get done quickly.
And again, this article is a great way to actually go through and it shows you all different types of cues and helps and things they can do. They can also do other activities, right? All different types of things that students do. This is another wonderful resource that you can utilize in your classroom to really help students as they get done quickly, or if they get done before the other students get done with it.
Now, one other thing I do want to show you talking about it, you know, to help students, I forgot to mention this earlier, to help students get done, I'm sorry, to help students kind of take what they're doing to the next level. We have this great site, it's called videos.vex.com. I've had the pleasure for the last couple years of going through myself and base spot, the co-founder of VEX, interviewing all these students, talking about their robot builds, talking about what they're doing in their engineering notebooks, as you see right here, okay? These are just fantastic resources that you can utilize for your students.
So again, they can actually see these different examples and then actually try to emulate them in your classroom and follow along what it is that they are doing in the classroom and see these examples from other students. This is what more advanced VEX teams do for the VEX competition, to be honest with you. They go through and they see what is required from that year's game. They analyze, you know, do I need a certain manipulator? Okay, I'm going to have to grab something, I'm going to have to carry something, may have to shoot into a goal, I have to grab an odd-sized object, whatever it is. And they go and they research previous years' games to see what those robots did. If they had to carry an odd-sized object, or if they had to intake that particular object, or if they had to carry it, or if the robot had to hang at the end of the competition, whatever it is, they go and they investigate successful robots from years past and they try to emulate that for their first round, for their first iteration.
Instead of you having to do all that investigation on your own, we created videos.vex.com as a resource. So you can actually go and look at these robots, listen to the students and see what it is that they are doing, okay? So we have all the different sections on it. Like I talked about, notebooking, engineering, reveals, right? So as people reveal their particular robots here, there's a lot of different things on there. But again, wonderful resource for you to be able to utilize effectively for those students to really take what they are doing to the next level with their building and their engineering in their classrooms, okay?
So let me review where we're at so far and then we'll get into the actual teaching part of this. Number one, engineering for novices. What's the important thing there? You want to close the gap, right?
You want to make sure that those students that do not have a lot of experience with building, you level the playing field between them and the rest of your students. We have the activities and the activities series to scaffold that process. Do not just throw them into the build instructions. Instead, have them go through and do those free builds. Introduce them to the pins, to the standoffs, to the beams, all those different concepts, slowly introducing them to that. Then you can go and have them follow the build instructions or they could follow the video that we have there in our teachers portal.
What do you do with more experienced students? Go to our STEM Labs, right? Our STEM Labs are a wonderful resource for you to start with the concepts and more sophisticated concepts around engineering, and then really allow your students to take it to the next level and use the different examples that we have on engineering.vex.com. And of course, if you can't find a particular example on there, that's how you can use the community. If you're stuck on a particular concept or if your students are stuck on a particular concept, ask for ideas in the community to see what other teachers are doing. Or if we have some expertise that we can share with you, we are more than happy to provide you with some prompts and some ideas and do some open-ended exploration with you. That's what our professional learning community is for, to help guide you so that you can then guide your students as they're doing these different engineering challenges within our STEM Labs.
Now, that only works, however, if you get this third part right, which is the teaching part, right? How do you put your students in a position to be successful? Whether you are just starting or you have the more experienced students that you want to take to the next level. And if you take nothing else from this video or this live session we're doing right now, please take this away. The number one thing that you have to do as a classroom teacher and you're teaching engineering is established amongst your classroom and amongst your students a STEM identity, okay? You have to establish the STEM identity.
What do I mean by that? When I say a STEM identity? If you have a STEM identity, that means you are not afraid to take risks. You do not view failure as failure. Instead, you view it as feedback in order to be able to get better. That is so very important. You have to create a culture in your classroom where your students are not afraid to take risks. How do you do that? You have to incentivize risk and actually make taking risks and failing the goal of the lesson or the activity. You can't just talk about it. You can't just pat little John or Susie on the back and say, "Oh, you tried well. Nice job, don't get discouraged." You have to make the actual focal point of the lesson, failure. Who can fail fast, learn, incorporate what they learned into their robot, and then repeat. That has to be the goal of your lesson you're trying to do, to go through and make that feedback loop as tight as possible and not, again, just to talk about failure as feedback and to encourage students when they do fail, but again, foreground and say, "You are going to fail and that's great. That's what I want you to do. Because the only way that you can learn successfully is if you fail. That's what I want you to be able to do."
Secondly, they've got to be comfortable with iteration. You've gotta recognize it's going to take a lot of different ways to be able to do this, and it's going to take a lot of different attempts to be able to do this. And my first attempt is not going to be right. You've gotta drill that into your students. Your first attempt is never right, and as a matter of fact, there is never a correct answer. The great thing about these VEX IQ, 2nd Gen competition, STEM Labs, is you are never done. You can always get better.
Thank you for your attention and dedication to fostering a growth mindset in your students. We hope these insights help you create a dynamic and supportive learning environment.
If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. We are here to support you in your teaching journey.
You can always improve the design of your robot. You can always improve your coding, and you can always improve your strategy. So you've got to become comfortable with iteration to be successful and to have a good STEM identity.
The third thing, and this is really incumbent upon you, the teacher, and not so much the students, is you have to create a culture where assessment is shared. Assessment is student-centered, not teacher-centered, because all that stuff I just talked about with risk-taking and being comfortable with iteration, as soon as you stamp a grade on it, it goes out the window. Forget it, it is done. If the goal of the lesson is for a student to get a certain grade on a rubric, or if the goal of the lesson for the student is to get a particular letter grade, they are never going to accept failure and they are never going to accept iteration because their goal is to try to get the highest grade possible because that is the incentive structure that we've created in our classroom. So you can't do that. You've got to get assessment right. You've got to make it so learning is the goal and not the grade. You have to shift the focus from an output, which is a grade, to an outcome, which is learning.
That's the third part about creating a STEM identity: the emphasis is on learning and not a particular output. You're instead focused on outcome. So those three things, you've got to incentivize failure, you have to be comfortable with iteration, and you have to focus on learning and not a letter grade. If you can do those three things in your classroom, then you will be successfully teaching engineering.
How do you organize that? How do you do that effectively? That's the engineering design process. This is something that we talk a lot about in our curriculum. This engineering design process is the process that you want to be able to engage your students with, and being involved in that process will facilitate that STEM identity that I talked about with you.
Now, I spent about 45 minutes with a video and a teacher portal for all of our VEX IQ 2nd Gen STEM Labs, talking about this engineering design process. But, so I'm not going to go through and talk about this again with you, but I want to point this out to you. This is the perfect organizer for that STEM identity that I talked about.
The one thing I want to mention to you also is this first step. This is where a lot of teachers and students mess up the engineering design process because they speed through that first step. Take your time on that first step. Really take your time thinking about the problem that you're trying to solve. Try to approach the problem from different perspectives. Make sure that you understand not just the problem, but also what you're actually trying to achieve. Really spend some time there at that first particular step.
One of the biggest things that I hear from both VEX IQ and VRC mentors all the time when I travel to competitions is that my students want to immediately start building a robot and they don't know the rules of the game. Now, I'm sorry, but that's your fault as a mentor because you are not creating the right environment where you value that first step in the engineering design process, where you actually have conversations with your students about what it is you're trying to do, how you're going to do it, and different perspectives upon it. You've really got to spend some time there.
In addition to that, research tells us that the process we talked about right there, really examining a problem from as many different angles as possible, is what fosters creativity. And of course, we're all aware that people are worried about AI replacing this job or that job.
Thank you for your attention and dedication to fostering a strong STEM identity in your students. Your efforts in creating a supportive and innovative learning environment are truly appreciated.
It's not going to replace those students of ours that are extremely creative. And you want to foster creativity in your classroom. This is how you do it right here: you spend time at the beginning really thinking about the problem that you're trying to solve, and you don't immediately jump into solving the problem, okay? That's what you want to spend some time doing. That's a key part of the engineering design process.
And then, of course, you build your first iteration, you go through it, you try to think about it, and then you optimize in step three. Now, the great thing about this is in those competition STEM Labs, you want the students to learn from each other. So if we're playing Tug of War, the STEM Lab I showed you, and I lose, well, what was the other robot doing? What was different with it? How did it work?
And then if you can create that classroom culture where the students are willing to talk to one another, right, about it, "Hey, we tried this with our robot and it was successful, did a really nice job." That is a really great way to foster that formative assessment, which the students, the other students, are doing the formative assessment check and not you, the teacher. That also falls into what I was talking about a second ago about making assessment student-centered as opposed to teacher-centered. That's another great example of it. That all falls into the engineering design process right here.
Now, I know if you're unfamiliar with our STEM Labs and you haven't read about it in our certification course about student-centered instructions and seeing our teacher notes and talked about the brief conversations and all that, this might be a lot for you. Ask a question in the community. I would love to engage in a conversation with you about how to really do this engineering design process. I talk about it in my book; I have a chapter devoted to it. So this is something I really enjoy talking about. So don't be afraid to ask those questions to the community, and we can have a great conversation about fostering the STEM identity amongst our students so we can teach engineering effectively amongst our students.
Okay, the last couple of minutes that we have here in our live session is that I want to talk about common teaching issues. I already talked about storage, already talked about students that get done early. The other big thing that we have is I don't have enough robots, right? This is another big issue that we have: I don't have enough robots. I'm teaching multiple classes, right? I'm teaching Robotics, period one, period three, period five, whatever it is, and I don't have enough sets, classroom bundles for all those particular classes. So what do I do?
Okay, a couple of different things you can do with that. Number one is you can utilize VEX GO, right? VEX GO is a plastic-based robotic system, just like VEX IQ, it's not as much plastic. The motors and the sensors are not as powerful as VEX IQ, but you can still do a lot of great engineering with VEX GO at a lower price point than VEX IQ. So instead of supplementing those classrooms with more IQ bundles, if you don't have the budget to do that, then use VEX GO. Buy VEX GO; this is a great way to supplement what your students are doing, and there's a lot of different building activities you can do.
And what we talked about when I was talking about engineering for the novices, beams and standoffs and pins, corner connectors, learning a chassis, attaching a wheel, attaching an axle. You'll learn all of that with VEX GO. It's the exact same process that you would have with this here. This is a great way to supplement what you are doing in your classroom at a lower price point than VEX IQ. So that's methodology number one. Methodology number two is you can supplement them with VEXcode VR.
Thank you for joining this session. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. We appreciate your dedication to fostering creativity and innovation in your classroom.
So basically, you can have your Robotics kit in period one, and then for periods three and five, have them do a coding challenge with VEXcode VR. Then do that for like two or three weeks. Then take those Robotics kits, let period three do the engineering activity, period one is now doing VEXcode VR, and now period five is doing another coding challenge. Then you bring the kit back up to period five. This is a way that you can get more out of your actual kits by using VEXcode VR to extend them in that fashion.
That example I just gave you, we have in a pacing guide which I'm going to show you right now, but we have another example in that pacing guide. So let me go back to my computer view and let me go to the Teach IQ page, which is right here. So this is teachiq.vex.com. Okay, let me go back to the top of the page so you can see the URL teachiq.vex.com. We have a welcome here. This video that Elena does walks you through everything that we're talking about right here. Let me go down to the scope and sequences right here.
We have engineering focus, coding focus, competition focus, multiple classes with one VEX IQ bundle. What's great about this, as you can see here, are these activities, like the Wheel It activity right here. You can do this activity after the BaseBot is built or the Sign activity. You can do this activity after the BaseBot is built. So if you've ever noticed, if you build a BaseBot, you're not using all the plastic in your kit, okay? You're not using everything in the kit when you build a BaseBot or a ClawBot for that matter. So what we've done is we've designed activities that you can utilize with the extra plastic that you have in your kit.
So you can have period one build the BaseBot. As the BaseBots are built, you can either keep them up, do some coding with it, or whatever, and then have the rest of the students do the activities that we have on there. It's all itemized for you there on that scope and sequence. Again, a great way that you can get more out of the actual kit that you have.
But hey, if you have other challenges that I haven't talked about here, or if you have different methods to solve those particular challenges, ask the question in the community. We'll be more than happy to get back to you and chat with you and talk with you about what those challenges are. Our collective heads here at VEX IQ and also with teachers all over the world, we will be able to solve those particular issues for you.
Are there any questions in the chat? No questions in the chat. So either you're saving your questions for your community, or I've answered all your questions here during the live session. Either way, that's great.
I do want to mention to you our next live session. Let me show that to you right now at pd.vex.com. Let me show you the live session. Well, I can't show you the live session because I'm not logged into it. But our next live session, I'll just tell you right now, is going to be on November 15th. We're going to be talking about data logging that will be in PD+ here, so stay tuned for that. You'll actually be able to see it, but that'll be up on there. I'll put a post about that in our community so you can be aware of that. You can go ahead and get that date marked on your calendar and be able to go from there.
Our next live session, again, is going to be on November 15th, and we're going to be talking about data logging, which is a really cool concept that I can't wait to share with you that you can actually do with your VEX platform. We're going to do a data logging session on both V5 and also VEX IQ, so stay tuned for that.
Thank you for your attendance in the live session here today.
I look forward to continuing this conversation and our professional learning community in VEX Professional Development Plus. Thank you very much for being a member of VEX Professional Development Plus.
Don't forget to visit conference.vex.com. We just launched that page a few weeks ago. We have information there about our VEX Educators Conference at VEX Worlds. You can submit an application to be a speaker at the VEX Educators Conference. That's all at conference.vex.com. We would love to see your application to come and speak at the VEX Educators Conference.
If you don't want to speak, nevertheless, we would love to see you at the VEX Educators Conference. Go to conference.vex.com to see all the information there.
And again, my name is Jason McKenna. Thank you so much for being a member of VEX PD+. I will speak with you soon.
Talk again soon from the VEX Classroom.
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