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Hi, and welcome back to the VEX Classroom. I'm Jason, and today I'm gonna talk to you about Group Work and having students work in groups when utilizing VEX GO. This is something that I always struggled with when I was teaching, was how to do effective group work with my students. Having students collaborate well, teaching those skills like communication. We all know how important that is. And if you're like me, as a teacher in the classroom, you're always hearing from your principal about how you want to be able to foster these skills in your classroom. But that's a lot easier said than done, right? How do you make sure that students are always engaged and how do you make sure that students are contributing equally? These are the challenges that we face as educators when it comes time for us to be able to do group work.

At VEX and specifically with VEX GO, which we're going to talk about right now, we think we've made that a little bit easier for you. The most important thing though, at the very beginning, which is not going to be outlined in the robotics roles and routines sheet which I'm gonna talk about here in a moment, but instead just with VEX GO in itself, you've got to make sure that you have a product that has a low barrier of entry and a very high ceiling. That's really kind of the first step in group work is you have to have something that's robust enough, that it requires multiple students to be able to do, but it's simple enough that students don't feel overwhelmed and they really don't know where to start.

This is why we say that education robotics is really the best organizer for project-based learning, or active learning, where students will be doing this type of collaborative work and being able to work together. We feel like robotics is the best way to do it because it's robust enough to have multiple students be able to work at the same time. It's engaging, kids love robotics. They think it's really cool. It's authentic, robots are all around us. And again, it's easy enough for anyone to get started immediately. So that's why we feel like robotics is a great organizer for project-based learning because it is such a great organizer for group work.

Now, the problem that you often have with group work with students, especially with younger students, like we're talking about with VEX GO, is oftentimes we expect them to self-organize. What do I mean by that? We expect them to work in a group of two or three, and everybody knows what everybody else should be doing. And they're all able to work together to find that common goal or to fulfill what it is you're trying to do with the particular lesson itself. I work with adults every day here in our VEX Pittsburgh office. And I can tell you self-organization is hard. It's hard for adults. It's almost impossible for students to be able to do. And we're really doing them a disservice as educators if we expect the students to be able to figure it out on their own. Again, adults have a difficult time doing it. Why would we expect young students to be able to do it?

So at VEX, we've created some tools that you can utilize. Some materials you can utilize to help organize student group works. Let's go take a look at that now. This is our physical science STEM lab. I'm in lab one, I'm in the summary, and you can see it for my materials list. We provide you with the robotics roles, routine sheets. I'm gonna go ahead and open that up now. And you can see it's a Google doc. And because it is a Google doc, you can edit it and you can use it as you see fit. You can see we have two different groups. We have a builder and we have a journalist. This is because for VEX GO, we recommend that you have two students working in a group. Now, as students get older with stuff like VEX IQ, we increase the amount of students working in the group, but with GO, we recommend two per group.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope you found this information helpful and that it inspires you to implement effective group work strategies in your classroom. Remember, fostering collaboration and communication skills in students is crucial for their development.

See you next time in the VEX Classroom!

You can see if the group name, the build that they're working on, and the goal of the build. So it's very, very important. Anytime the students are working in the group, the students and the teachers are on the same page in terms of what needs to get done. Then, you're able to delineate all the different responsibilities. At the bottom, you have things that everyone's going to be responsible for, and a little reflection sheet at the very bottom.

Now, if I go back to the lab and select the image slideshow, you're going to see here on slide two, suggested roles and responsibilities. These are suggestions by us, but you can change them if you want to. You can change the name if you don't like the name builder or journalist. This gives students specific guidelines that they can utilize, so they don't have to self-organize. Instead, they are able to have some guidance here that they can then apply to the lab itself.

Again, this is a very nice way for you to organize group work. Because of the robust nature of VEX GO, everyone has a specific role that they can utilize. It's easy for them to get started, and it really just makes a nice learning process for the students. What I just showed you in the physical science STEM lab, that particular lab itself, is in all of our STEM labs. So anywhere that students have to work collaboratively, we are going to have those roles in there for you.

In addition, linked below, we're going to have a knowledge-based article that talks about how you can work together and do pair programming with coding. You might find that as a great resource also. I would encourage you to please share your reflections, ideas, and what's working for you in our professional learning community around group work. We would love to learn from you. We all want to learn together, so share what is doing well, or maybe not so well, in your classroom with group work, so we can all learn from one another.

Thank you very much. Robotics is a great way to organize project-based learning. Can't wait to see what you're going to do, and I'll see you in our next video.

Thank you.

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