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Hi everybody and welcome to the VEX Classroom. My name is Audra and I'm here to talk to you today about STEM Labs and how to use them with your students. As you know, STEM Labs are the building blocks of the VEX GO curriculum. They're designed to be your online teacher's manual to give you all the tools that you need to plan, teach, and assess with VEX GO in your classroom.

Elementary teachers might have a master's degree in teaching language arts, but you still get this giant teacher's manual with your curriculum. When it comes to teaching STEM, many of us elementary teachers do not have degrees in engineering or computer science and there is no manual. So we in VEX want to correct that imbalance and so we created STEM Labs. You should approach a STEM Lab the same way you would this book. Just as you wouldn't show your students all the reference material that's listed here, you wouldn't show your students that part of the STEM Lab either. That's why it's in the teacher portal. It's for teachers.

Teaching with STEM Labs does not require hours of preparation either. In fact, you can prepare for a STEM Lab in as little as 10 or 15 minutes. You simply review the goals, the objectives, and the activities in the lab while you're getting ready to teach. The predictable pattern of engage, play, and share can help you to visualize the flow of your class as you're preparing to teach it. Then you present the concepts and activities to your students while displaying the lab image slideshows in the classroom.

Each STEM Lab contains a premade slideshow with all of the images that are inside of the teacher-facing lab but in a student-facing vehicle. So students can see the images of the builds, the blocks, or the robot while you facilitate the discussion and activities. These slides are intentionally minimal because VEX GO is designed to be a hands-on platform where students are actively building and coding and collaborating to learn about the concepts, not just reading about them.

The prompts in the steps of the STEM Labs are there for you as you're teaching, but you do not have to read them word for word. The same way you would make your language arts curriculum your own, you can do that with STEM Labs too. They're meant to offer complete lessons, but also give teachers the flexibility to be able to match their teaching style and the needs and the interests of your students in your classroom. STEM Labs are meant to give you all of the tools that you could possibly need to plan, teach, and assess with VEX GO.

So what do we mean by tools? Well, you don't have to be a physicist to teach elementary students about force and motion. The background information of the physical science unit, for instance, gives you information about it and information that you were equipped to answer the follow-up questions that might come from your students. Perhaps you're wondering about how to facilitate students coding together. The robotics roles and routines is there to support you. Are you looking for a lively demonstration to peak your students' interest at the beginning of the lab? The acts and asks of the engage section will take you through that.

Just like your teacher's manual takes the pressure off of you to source and create your own language arts curriculum, the VEX GO STEM Labs do the same thing for your STEM curriculum. For more detailed information about using STEM Labs and implementing them in your classroom, there are plenty of articles in the VEX knowledge base, which can be found at the link below. And the VEX GO certification course is available as well to guide you through all of the facets of the VEX GO platform in one place.

We've designed all of these resources in the VEX GO STEM Labs for you, the educator, to feel supported and successful to bring STEM alive with your students.

We're excited to see what you do with VEX GO in your classroom.

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