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Chapter 2 / Lesson 1: Build Instructions

This video begins Chapter 2 of the Building with VEX GO Training Course. If you have not yet completed Chapter 1, go back to complete Chapter 1 first.

In Chapter 2, you will:

  • Be introduced to builds.vex.com
  • Get acquainted with build instructions
  • Learn how to follow build instructions to build the Unpowered Super Car

In this video you will be introduced to build instructions, and will follow along with the build instructions to use your VEX GO Kit to build the Unpowered Super Car. 

Links in this video: 

(upbeat music)

Hello, and welcome back to the VEX Classroom. My name is Audra, and here we are together in Chapter Two. We are going to begin this chapter by looking at Build Instructions for VEX GO. As you noticed when we started building Josh from the storybook in chapter one, there are some very discrete build instructions that come with many of the different things that you can do with VEX GO. You can also use the pieces to do free building, which we'll get to much later in this course.

We're going to begin with simple build instructions, again, to be able to help you take all of the pieces in the kit and use them in a simplified, easy to put together way, so this way you know that you are building something that will work and you're building something that you and all of your students can build together to be able to have a consistent experience. So, let's get started.

When we want to find build instructions, there are many places we can do that. The first place and the place we're going to talk about today is builds.vex.com. So, I'm going to say that one more time. You can see it on the screen, builds.vex.com. Builds.vex will hold all of the build instructions for all of the building platforms across the VEX continuum. So, we're going to take a look at that together to be able to see what we can find for VEX GO.

Okay, so here we are at builds.vex.com. So, I just type that into my browser and it takes me directly to this page where I can see VEX robot builds. So, now we're going to follow the instructions on the page, choose the platform that we want to view, and we want to view VEX GO. So, when we open this up, it will take us to all of the VEX GO builds that there are currently build instructions for. And there are a lot of them. They are sorted on this page based on the name of the build or the kind of groupings of the build. You can find builds sorted by subject area, like science, or math, or art, or you can find things related to the VEX GO competitions.

For our purposes in this video, all we're going to do is take a look at one set of build instructions so we can kind of get familiar with what we can expect when we are using build instructions or bringing them to our classroom. So, we are going to open the very first set right here for the Unpowered Super Car. And I'm going to select these words that say "build instructions."

Now you'll notice that when we open the build instructions they are a PDF file. So, there are a number of different ways that you can share these with your students when you are bringing build instructions to the classroom. You may want to open them up on your teacher device and project them on a smart board or with a projector so this way everyone can see the same thing at the same time. Or if your students have their own devices, you may want them to open up their own set of build instructions so they can move through them individually. Or, if you have access to a high-quality color printer, you may also want to print them.

You'll notice that the build instructions are full color, so we want to make sure that if you do print them out that you're not printing them in black and white or something like that because we want to be able to see the different colors of the pieces so that we can easily match them to the pieces in your kit. You will also notice, as I kind of skip through these, that the build instructions do not really have words. They are all given via images. So, the same way that we put things together to build Josh in the storybook is the same way that we will put things together to build a number of other things from cars to pendulums, to the code-based robot, and so on and so forth.

Thank you for joining me in this chapter. I hope you find these instructions helpful and enjoy building with VEX GO. See you in the next chapter!

So, you'll see many of the same things that you saw with Josh, like the pink lines that connect the pieces together, the first image that shows how the pieces connect, and the second image that shows what this step should look like. You'll also see in the corner of each step a little box that gives you the pieces you will need to take out of your kit to complete this step.

When you begin building with students, they don't have to take out everything that they'll need. They work step-by-step, just as we will do in the very next video when we build this Unpowered Super Car. And when we're building, we'll talk through some of the symbols and the things that you might see.

For now, we just wanted to give a very general overview of what you can expect to see when you open up a set of build instructions. So, now that you know where to find build instructions, builds.vex.com, I'm sure you can probably say that with me at this point, you can move on to the next video where we will go into that Unpowered Super Car and we will actually build from build instructions to follow them together step-by-step to get you comfortable with using build instructions with your VEX GO kit.

(upbeat music)

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Additional Resources

Have a question about this lesson? Ask your question in the VEX Professional Learning Community.