(upbeat music)

Hello and welcome everyone to the Thinking Outside the Classroom Live session. My name is Alaina, I'm a Senior Education Developer here with VEX, and today we are going to talk all about afterschool programs and more specifically bringing competitions or STEM competitions to those afterschool programs.

So we're going to go over a few different things for 123, GO, IQ, and VEXcode VR. Let's go ahead and go over what we're going to be talking about in this session. Here is our session agenda: we're going to be discussing how we can bring these STEM competitions into afterschool spaces. This is not to say that you can't do this in a traditional classroom or in something like summer camp or weekend workshops, but this is really about getting into the excitement of competitions and bringing them in so that you have a chance to really get students excited and to get them to do something a little bit different than they might do in their afterschool clubs.

We'll talk about how you can differentiate competitions with 123, with our Clean Your Room timed trials, and discuss how you can use Leaderboards to really bring that excitement to the classroom and make that competition feel even more exciting. Then, we'll discuss competitions being more than mobile robots. Moving into VEX GO, we'll talk about a Tallest Tower Challenge and how you can use the VEX Leaderboards with those other types of challenges. We'll also get into a Look Alike Contest, something even more different than the Tallest Tower Challenge, and talk about superlative awards.

With the remaining time, we'll explore VEXcode VR competitions and how you can do these virtual competitions, which are really helpful when you don't want to use any kind of supplies or when you're making the most of your time in an afterschool space.

First, the question we want to answer is: what are the needs of afterschool programming? This is mostly from my experience, though I'm sure others have their own needs as part of it. What I have seen is that it needs to be easy to prepare and set up for. You are already teaching a whole day of school and you need something that's easy to grab and set up because you don't have anything like a prep period or additional time.

Along with that, you need things to be portable. You have no idea what room you're going to be in, or there are situations where you have booked the computer lab, you know you're in the computer lab that week for club, and then someone else takes it. You always have to be really flexible with these afterschool programming needs. Having competitions ready in your back pocket is great, so you can pull them out, get ready to go, and have those ready.

Another aspect of afterschool clubs is that it's very frequent to have a wide range of ages. We'll discuss how each of the examples I have can be used with students of all different ages so that they have the same overarching competition, but students are competing in their own skill range. It's not a fifth grader versus a kindergartner on a coding challenge because that's not fair or fun for the students.

Finally, going with easy to prepare and set up, it also needs to be fast to clean up and put away. We've all seen students get picked up halfway through, leaving a giant mess at their station, and then you have to clean it up because they're already gone by the time you get there. So, really trying to make sure that it's easy to clean up is crucial.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope you find this session informative and inspiring for your afterschool programs. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. Have a great day!

It's not disruptive if a student leaves early from the competition either; it doesn't throw off a bracket of a competition or something along those lines. So that is what I was looking at as I was developing these different types of activities or these different types of competitions.

The first one that we are going to get into is in VEX 123, and we're going to be talking about the Clean Your Room challenge. Rather than just talking through a slide, I wanted to show you a little bit about what the Clean Your Room Challenge looks like. I have some pom-poms here. This is a really popular activity that we have for VEX 123. However, it's not often that we turn this into a competition.

Here I have my VEX 123 robot. It has an art ring on the top, and I just have some pipe cleaners out front so it can push things off of the tile. I have my pom-poms here so I can scatter them around. The idea with the Clean Your Room challenge is to take your robot and actually push all of the litter or debris here off of the field to clean your room, which in this case is a tile. That's the basics of the challenge.

What's really great about this is that you have so many ways to differentiate this challenge. You can do something very basic using this with the touch buttons for younger students to compete in. You can have them go through and time how long it takes for them once they start their project to push everything off of the tile. I could start my robot, push it forward, and then turn to push the green one off. Let's say in this case I'm trying to just push off these two. I pushed off two pom-poms, and I did it in probably three or four seconds. I could reset that so they're in the same square and try again to push off more in a faster time, which gives us that competition aspect.

If I wanted to challenge my students, I could also give them coder cards and have them do this with the coder and coder cards. Just while I'm here, this is a question that we get quite often: how to store your coder cards. What I do with mine in particular is I just took a pipe cleaner and put it through both of the holes right here, so it makes it a little book. I know I have all of my coder cards here, and it's just inside using a pipe cleaner. There are really simple ways to keep your coder cards all together if you wanted to do that, especially when you're transporting materials from one location to another in that after-school programming. That's just a side tip if you wanted something for carrying around coder cards.

Here you could do the exact same challenge, but pushing the pom-poms off of the tile using the coder. There are also extra ways to do this challenge. I have extra tiles, so I can set this up. Instead of just shoving everything under our bed like this implies and getting these all connected, that's one thing with the Clean Your Room challenge: you don't necessarily, when you're cleaning your room, push everything under the bed and call it good. Normally there's somewhere that you have to put things away.

With this, you can spread your pom-poms out across the field. Sorry about that if there was some noise there. You can spread your pom-poms out across the field and designate somewhere to be your toy box. I can say that this is my toy box. Now all of my pom-poms need to go into the toy box. This is another way to level up that challenge so that older students then have more time maybe to edit the attachment on their robot. Maybe they need it to be more of a scoop. You could do something like this, change it up really quickly, and now you can actually gather these pom-poms, bring them to the toy box, and see how many pom-poms you can get in the toy box as quickly as possible.

You can do this with Touch Coder, and you also could go through with VEXcode. So you have the opportunity now to do all sorts of different differentiated projects.

Now, that was a lot. So just to summarize what we're talking about with the cleaner room is that you have these five levels. You can push all of the pom-poms off of the tile with touch. You could do that with coder. You could push all of the pom-poms into the toy box with Touch Coder, or you could do that with VEXcode 123. Especially if you're looking at a wide range of ages, looking at what you can do with the VEX 123 for that high ceiling is a great way to do that. Using 123 and using VEXcode 123 specifically gives that extra challenge as part of it.

Now, what's really great about all of this is that we need a way to keep track of these scores, and we can do that using a VEX Leaderboard. All of these Leaderboards are available at leaderboards.VEX.com. So I'm going to pull up one. Now you have them for all of the platforms. We're going to talk about 123 right now, but you could use them for everything from VEXcode VR to VEXcode IQ, whatever you might be using.

What this does is now you have a leaderboard or a rank. If you're doing a timed challenge, you have a timer right at the top. I can start that timer and have it run. I know that team B is doing their project; they just pushed the sixth pompom into the toy box, and they are done. I can hit stop, and I know that their time was 13 seconds. I could actually change this. I could say score one is pom-poms, so it's the number of pom-poms they got, which will say six in our imaginary scenario, and this is the time it took or total time. Let's go with total time. You can add these up together. They got 19 points.

Maybe that's not exactly how you want to score, and this total time isn't really what we want to score by. We can minus that out and actually get rid of that column altogether. Then if team three comes in and collects nine pom-poms, it automatically sorts for you in the Leaderboard where that team is. You could add additional rows if you wanted to do points, additional points, change team names, or add additional teams. There's a lot you can do with a leaderboard that gives you a lot of opportunity to project this up for students so they can see how they're doing compared to the rest of the class. You could have multiple Leaderboards up so that way you have one leaderboard that is your toy box.

Ooh, it helps if I can toy box, with touch Leaderboard. Now you know what they're doing, how they're scoring, all of that as part of this. So those are there. Amy is in the chat as well. If you have any questions, go ahead, put those in the chat. She'll be able to answer them, and we'll also have a link to the leaderboards.vex.com in there as we go through.

The Leaderboards are a really great way to take something like the cleaner room challenge and bring it to life, making it a more exciting competitive atmosphere that really helps bring that excitement in the afternoons when someone might be getting a little tired. It also gives you an opportunity to really be a facilitator of the activity. Once you give students what they're doing, you tell them where they can enter their score, they can go ahead and run all of their time trials, and they have the power then or are empowered to help lead their own competitions in this afterschool situation.

So now we're going to clean up from VEX 123 and move into VEX GO. With VEX GO, we're going to be talking about the Leaderboards again, but we're going to talk about them in a different manner. How can you use the Leaderboards when you're not doing specific points or timing, something along those lines?

Let me go ahead, I'm going to clean this up, and we'll move back into VEX GO.

So VEX GO, one of the challenges that's my personal favorite that's actually in a STEM lab is the tallest tower challenge. Students are challenged to use things like connectors and beams in order to create the tallest possible tower. They do this to learn about these specific pieces, but my thought when I was considering after-school programming is how exciting this would be as a timed challenge or just as a challenge on its own.

With this, I have a few different criteria and constraints that I suggest. However, they could be something completely different depending on your learning situation or the age of your students, which again goes back to that differentiation for all of these different parts.

With 123, something we didn't talk about is these pieces here. I used the pipe cleaners for my pushing for the Clean Your Room challenge. The art ring is actually compatible with VEX GO pieces. So if you have older students who are familiar with Go, who may not be as excited about the Clean Your Room Challenge, they could design the attachment for their team as part of that. There's a lot you could do cross-platform as well to make a better pushing mechanism or a better cleaning mechanism just by using VEX GO parts with the art ring for VEX 123.

Returning to the tallest tower challenge, we have a few different criteria and constraints. My suggestion is to start off by only being able to use a certain number of parts and to have it be freestanding. This is a very basic challenge, and some students may thrive with this open-ended approach, while others may need more support or more criteria to really get ideas going. That's where some of the additional constraints could come in as well.

Now for this, I actually wanted to do this together. I'm dropping things over on the side. Excuse me. I actually wanted a chance to do some of this together with you. So what I want to do is, if I'm pulling up a leaderboard for the tallest tower challenge, and it could only use 15 parts, let's see, I'm going to go back. I'm going to set up my leaderboard for VEX GO. This is the tallest tower challenge, and I want to score it by how many pieces I use plus the amount of time it takes me to, or the height, let's say. So the more pieces that you use of the 15 and the taller it gets, that could be something that you use as your criteria for this challenge as you go through.

I'm Team Alaina. So what we can do now is think through this process of what a challenge would look like using these VEX GO pieces. Now I have a field tile here. You could use them as part of that freestanding option, or you could actually remove the field tile and tell students it has to be built just using the parts in the kit, whatever you want to do.

My first idea, if you're talking about freestanding, is to use what you're given. That is the first thing that I would always tell my students as part of this: let's see what you have and what you can use as part of it. To me, I look at the battery and see a great freestanding structure that has holes in it that I can attach to. So what I would do as someone coming in and doing a competition is grab big connectors, connect them to my battery, and actually do something like this so that I have a great base to start from. Now I have three pieces, and it's already one, two, three bits tall here, and we'll say one tall for the battery. You could use any kind of ruler or part of that. You also could use something like the actual holes on the side or the pitch count of them as well.

If I'm going to create something that's tall, you want space to do that. This is a very quick and simple example as part of it. But using something like the connectors with these big plates gives you somewhere to start your projects and start building up.

Thank you for your attention and participation. I hope you find these challenges engaging and inspiring for your students. Happy building!

Now I only have one more orange, so maybe I want to use the green here. You can see how this challenge would continue and move forward. I'm not going to finish my entire tower because you understand where we're going here, but now what you could do is you could pull out a ruler. This is my VEX IQ ruler, however, you could use the VEX GO ruler, any one of those. I could measure the height, which from the green is 80 millimeters, so not too bad. So I could go over to my leaderboard, I could say the height was 80.

Let's make sure we give things units because that's important, especially when you're working with your students, telling them what units they're going to be working in is very important for a height challenge. Otherwise, you may have scores all over the place because some are measuring in inches, some are measuring in centimeters, some in millimeters, and it really just kind of throws off all of that. I prefer to work in centimeters and millimeters because the metric system is the standard for many STEM jobs as well as with millimeters. You can be really accurate around the height itself.

And then my second score would be how many pieces I use. So I use one battery, the two orange, that's three, the gray plate, and two green. So that's six pieces. So that's the number of pieces and that's six. So now my score becomes 86. I didn't use all of the pieces I could, I obviously didn't get as tall as I needed to, but you understand how this challenge, especially if you put a time limit on it, can be a really exciting way and only use a few pieces. It's really easy to clean up as part of that as well.

So that is our VEX GO tallest tower challenge using our Leaderboards here. We've talked a fair amount now about these Leaderboards. We've talked about how you can use them for those mobile robots with the VEX 123, we've talked about how you can use them for VEX GO with a more abstract challenge for STEM. And now we're going to go into VEXcode I or VEX IQ, excuse me, which has a totally different way of how you can do competitions.

Let me move my pieces around, get set up for you real quick. So with VEX IQ, I wanted to think of something that was totally different from what you might do in a competition that you might see in some of our VEX IQ second gen STEM Labs. VEX IQ second gen STEM Labs are all built around the different competitions and built around classroom competitions, which is really exciting.

However, let me actually talk to you guys for a second instead of just staring at my screen. It's really exciting to have these classroom competitions, but students who are used to the classroom competitions like freeze tag or up and over or cube collector, soccer, whatever it may be, may want something different. They may want a different kind of challenge to express some of that creativity in building because a lot of our challenges are focused strictly on engineering and computer science.

Being able to focus more on the free building aspect and that creativity in that art, or even in this case going into some of the science, gives you a great opportunity then in order to bring other students who may not be as excited about the mobile robots and get them into Robotics, get them into building in this new way in their afterschool programs.

For VEX IQ, what I came up with was the look-alike contest. We have something similar in VEX GO with the activity called creature creation and being able to use that with VEX IQ also shows how compatible these platforms are as well.

The Look Alike contest, let's go through some of the rules real quick before I show you my examples.

With the Look Alike contest, you would share images of common animals or allow students to use their imaginations for other types of animals they might use, or amphibians, insects, whatever they might be into that day or whatever might go into a really cool science unit they may be studying in school as well in their regular classrooms. So you could share those images of them to kind of help get them started. Then, challenge students to come up with a design using VEX IQ parts to recreate that animal.

So here, let me show you real quick. First, I have my turtle. We saw that image in the slideshow of our turtle swimming, and here is my VEX IQ turtle. It has moving parts; the legs and arms move, the head itself. Oh, I thought it moved, I forgot my own design. But you have these moving parts, you have three dimensions with the shell itself. Now, I have all of these ideas for what a challenge might be with this or what a potential award could be.

Also, I have a giraffe, so this is much more two-dimensional. You can see the spots here on the side. We've got his ears, you've got the eye that kind of move. So it's not quite exact, but now you have these different examples of animals that you could create with VEX IQ parts.

Now, with these kinds of competitions, it's a little different to try and score or create a winner. So in that case, I suggest using things like superlative awards, doing something like what has the most moving parts with no motors, what has the most moving parts with motors. This is a really good activity that would parallel well with something like a makerspace. As you go in through, you could use different materials as well, or you could limit it just to IQ parts found in the kit. You have this opportunity now to award different ideas. What is the most colorful design? What is the largest animal?

In this case, my giraffe might be a little flat, it might not look as colorful as the turtle, but it is much larger than the turtle and it is recognizable as a giraffe. So this might be the largest VEX IQ animal for my classroom. You have the opportunity now to do competitions in a different way and use things like superlative awards to help students get excited about competitions and still walk away with some sort of win under their belt as part of that.

I would also suggest sharing the possible superlatives ahead of time because that way you get a chance for students to possibly design to look for a specific award. In this case, I know that maybe I don't want to work with motors, but I could design something that has the most moving parts and work around those designs to try and win that award, which could help students come up with ideas to get started as well as part of that.

So that is the VEX IQ Look Alike contest. Now we've covered three of our physical robots and the different types of STEM competitions that you can do in order to bring those to those after-school spaces.

Beyond that, we also have VEXcode VR. VEXcode VR is a great place to continue challenges. VEXcode VR is online, it is fully online-based. You don't need any logins for students. If you are using something like Rover Rescue or the 123 Playspace, you do need a subscription as part of that, but you can get those. But your students do not need individual logins, which is really important, making sure that they can just jump on and start working right away.

What's great here is that with the 123 Playspace, we actually have a cleaner room activity in VEXcode VR.

So you could take what you're doing with your 123 robot, you could do that for a week, have an opportunity to build that, do that challenge for a week straight or maybe a few days, and then the next week bring those students to the computer lab. For their after-school challenge, they could continue coding their robot, this time in VEXcode VR, in order to clean their room using this 123 Playspace. We also have additional options like the Coral Reef Cleanup or Rover Rescue.

What's really fantastic about something like Rover Rescue in particular, let me go ahead and pull up these activities. So I'm going to select the Rover Rescue Playground. Here it is, continue, yes. What's really fantastic while this loads is that there are online leaderboards as well. So we've talked about classroom leaderboards. Now your students have a chance to compete against other people or across the world in these challenges as well.

You can see here it's a really exciting playground. In this, your robot has to go through, collect power, and neutralize enemies in order to survive as long as possible on this planet. Now if I open an example, excuse me, let's see. Minerals, finding minerals. So here what this is going to do is when I run this project, it'll go through, have my robot find a mineral and use it, which will help gather experience points for my robot.

If you have questions about how robot rescue is played, we do have extensive support in the VEX Library with articles about how this game is run and played or different ideas for strategies. So it's going to go collect that mineral. And now I can see I gathered two experience points. So now if I hit stop, I have the option to view statistics, I can see this.

Now what you also could do is I'm working on a staff license so it's showing up a little bit differently. But if you were to run this yourself, you would have the option to get a certificate to show how long you survived, how many experience points you had as part of that, or in how many enemies neutralized. So you have all of this.

If we go back to leaderboards.VEX.com, I can see I have options for the classroom Leaderboards, but I also have an option for Rover Rescue. Here I can see that for the top 20, most of it is actually in Maryland, which is really exciting. I can see the number of days explored, total experience gained, enemies neutralized. So you can see the top 20 for the United States, or excuse me, for the world, or you can search for specific countries and regions.

If I wanted to look in Poland, Poland doesn't have anything in there, but if I go to South Korea I can see, so you can start looking through at specific states or specific countries, specific states. If I go to Pennsylvania, now you can see how you rank against other people in your state, which is a really exciting way to bring the classroom or bring the competition beyond the classroom, beyond after school, and really get students excited about coding and possibly being able to work their way up the leaderboard for their state as part of that.

So that is just one way to do a VEXcode VR competition. Now we also have additional competitions for VEXcode VR. If I go to the VEXcode VR activities, we have additional types of competitions that can be done throughout any of them. Now we can do something like the Castle Crasher Plus, which also had its own online leaderboard with something like crash course. So you can actually just give students an activity like crash course here and then have them go through, code their robot, complete the activity, and then post their scores on this international leaderboard as part of that.

VEXcode VR is a really great way to help and get everyone excited about coding through competitions as well.

You have the opportunity to do them both in the classroom competition, and you also have that opportunity to do them in those larger international leaderboards. What's really great about all of this, and what I highly recommend, is also giving out certificates to your students. With the leaderboards themselves, there is an option to print out a certificate for each team. We also saw the certificate option in VEXcode VR. So you have that opportunity to give students certificates to show what they've accomplished on that day.

If I go back, let me show you real quick what one of those looks like. If I go back to my 80 and six from the tallest tower challenge, right next to this trash can, I have a print button. And what this is going to do, it's loading, one second. I'm not actually going to print it, but it tells me my team name, the rank, and the name of the leaderboard, as well as the total score. You can use these as digital badges, you could screenshot them and send them to students in your LMS. You could print them out and have them at pickup for parents as well. It gives students something to take with them and say, "Hey, guardian, I did so well in my challenge today in after-school program in club. I made the tallest tower out of VEX GO pieces."

This then gives an opportunity to continue the conversation that so often is lacking. We've all seen students come home or leave school and tell their parents that they have no idea what they did that day. What's really great is with something like a challenge, with something like a competition, you're getting students that intrinsic motivation to do better, to continue to work on their projects or to continue to work on their builds so that they can find another way, a way to score better, a way to score higher, whether it be beating other people or beating their own scores as part of that. You can compete against both your classroom, you can compete against that international, but it's also competing against yourself just to see how good or how well you can do in a competition.

So those are all of the ideas I have. I will leave a couple of minutes for questions. If not, I will go ahead and let you all have a few extra minutes of your evening back. But I'll open the floor to questions about after-school competitions.

I love the idea of doing the 123 as a competition. I never even thought about bringing competition down to the little kids, but the clean the room thing, I could see my kids just loving that. I think what's really great about doing something even with young students is it also gives them an opportunity to constructively fail. A big part of challenge and competition is knowing that someone else is doing better than you and that's okay. So what can you do to be better? What can you do to improve yourself? Giving that constructive failure, I think, is a beautiful part of competitions and something that students of all ages can learn through.

That's awesome. Yes, I am actually going to do that tomorrow because I was looking for something fun to do tomorrow because they see all of the third and fourth and fifth graders coming into my room to see the Mars kit had displayed and they're like, well, what can we do, what can we do? And I couldn't think of anything, so I'm going to take pictures and send them to you tomorrow. We're going to give it a try.

That's amazing. I love hearing that. That's the kind of beauty of doing the live sessions too, is hopefully giving everyone ideas that you can take back and use, which is great to hear. I will post the slides in the thread for this class just so you can see the images and everything and the ideas for levels. I'll post those once we're done tonight, just in case you wanted to look at anything.

Thank you everyone so much for your time.

I'll give you a few extra minutes of your evening back, but this is a great session and I love sharing all the ways to do competition with students in the classroom or outside of the classroom, which is more around what I love to see in particular.

Thank you so much. I'll see you next time.

Thank you.

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